Biden Is a Slight Favorite to Win Re-Election (a model)

Biden Is a Slight Favorite to Win Re-Election

April 15, 2024 at 8:51 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard 0 Comments

The following guest post is from Spencer Lindsay, a faculty member in the School of Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona.

https://politicalwire.com/2024/04/15/biden-is-a-slight-favorite-to-win-re-election/

"SNIP...........

Predicting elections and estimating the uncertainty around those predictions is not an easy task. It is especially difficult to have a clear picture of the outcome six and a half months before the election. This does not mean, however, that the math is unable to shed light on the state of the race nor that it will fail to teach meaningful lessons about where things stand.

I have built a model that will be updated throughout the race to predict the outcome of November’s Presidential Election. The model predicts the outcome of state-level races using two variables- the result from the previous election and the average of polls in that state.

Generally, the goal is to use all non-partisan polls taken within the last month from the top 100 pollsters according to Fivethirtyeight, weighting the average by sample size.

To predict the outcome of each state, I gathered data from 19 states, which could conceivably be competitive in 2024, from 2004 to 2020. I ran a regression model using the outcome of the previous election and a polling average from April 15 of that cycle to predict that elections’ outcome. The date of the polling average used to predict the outcomes and uncertainty will be updated periodically throughout the cycle.

............SNIP"