Today is (finally) the US Presidential Election. Can the results be predicted ahead of time? The Economist Magazine has a prediction model (here) but most experts seem to be saying that the race is too close to call. I'll make a prediction because I have a little different approach than other forecasters. My results won't be very comforting.
First, I've created an Index of Political Support (see the graphic above, click to enlarge, the solid red line is the toss-up election line). A positive standard score indicates support for the GOP; a negative value indicates support for the Democratic party (this isn't a value judgment, just a way to present data). Elections happened every four years in the US, but the support index is continuous and nonlinearly interpolated between elections. Support has cycled back and forth between parties over time with the mid-1970s to mid-1990s being GOP high points (except for the Carter years).
Then, I tested four models: (1) A Random Walk (RW), (2) A BAU (Business-As-Usual), (3) a US Economy Index model and (4) A World System Index model. The Index models are similar to the Atlanta Fed GDPNow Model except that the Political Support Index is substituted for GDP. If we accept the results of opinion polling (here), the US Economy should be the major determinant of Political Support with Foreign Policy (the World System Index) being the fourth most important. The BAU model would essentially mean that people cast their votes traditionally, possibly based on family upbringing. But, what would the RW model mean?
A Random Walk model, Support(t) = Support(t-1) + E(t-1), indicates that Political Support today is a function of yesterday's Political Support plus Random Error, E. It is sometimes called the Drunkard's Walk which assumes that randomness rules our lives, "...history being one damned thing after another." It would mean that Political Support is essentially unpredictable.
It turns out the the RW and BAU are the best models using the AIC Criterion. The RW or BAU result feel pretty appropriate for the current Presidential Election in the US. The voters seem to be very conflicted and acting randomly. The GOP nominee, a former single-term president, has an unsavory political and criminal record. The Democratic nominee, the current Vice President, is fighting deep-seated racial and misogynistic undercurrents in American history. The US has had only one Black president and has never had a female president.
What does this mean for our political system? David Easton's model of the Political System (here) might need to be modified. Support might be a poor method of controlling the System if it is simply a Random Walk. We have to wait for some Shock such as the Vietnam War or the 1973 Oil Crisis or the Great Inflation the Dot-Com Bubble or the Subprime Mortgage Crisis or the COVID-19 Pandemic (did I miss anything) to force the country out of random voting. Even then, it seems that the voters have poor memories (the botched handling of the COVID-19 Pandemic was during the Trump Administration and the Inflation Reduction Act did not cause the COVID-19 supply-chain inflation).
There is plenty of blame to go around. Can the Two-Party System be expected to field reasonably competent candidates who will run the country effectively? Can the Legal System hold political elites accountable for criminal activity? Can Congress impeach presidents who are incompetent? Can our Educational Systems produce citizens who can process economic and political information and make decisions?
Maybe my most depressing question is whether Democracy is compatible with Capitalism? Every day we go to work in organizations that are Authoritarian. They are not democracies. Our only experience with Representative Democracy is periodic elections which seem unable to sort out competent from incompetent candidates. Competent candidates seem to want nothing to do with political offices.
One positive trend is the Ballot Initiative (there should be more of these and some States do not allow them). Some of the big questions of the day (here) should be put to the voters. The political parties should make recommendations for each initiative and give their reasons. Only minor issues should be put to incompetent political representatives.
Data and Sources
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