ECONOMIC EXPECTATIONS AND ELECTION OUTCOMES

At its most basic level, this forecast of the 2012 presidential election performed successfully. The model forecasted the reelection of President Obama. With 53.8% of the two-party vote; he ended up with 51.8% (as of November 28, 2012), yielding an error of 2.0 percentage points. Prior to 2012 the average out-of-sample forecasting error was 3.34 points. Here, the model does better than the average of the previous years by almost a point. Running the model with the added data point does not change matters appreciably. The economic item increases slightly and the logged time in the White House item weakens slightly. The overall fit of the model is just a bit lower.