Citizen forecasts
- Based on poll question that asks people who they think will win the election
- Long history, highly accurate, but largely overlooked by pollsters
Regardless of who you prefer, who do you think would win the presidential election if Joe Biden were the Democratic candidate and Donald Trump were the Republican candidate?
Economist / YouGov
Citizen forecasts are among the most accurate methods for forecasting elections
The vote expectation question asks people who they expect to win the election. The aggregate responses of these citizen forecasts are then used as a forecast of who will win the election. If data on historical elections are available, one can convert the aggregate responses to popular vote-share forecasts. Although vote expectation surveys have been around at least as long as scientific polling, they have long been overlooked as a method for forecasting election outcomes.
One study compared the accuracy of citizen forecasts to forecasts from polls, prediction markets, quantitative models, and expert judgment. Across the last 100 days prior to the seven US presidential elections from 1988 to 2012, citizens’ vote expectations provided more accurate forecasts of election winners and vote shares than each of the four established methods. Compared with polls, vote expectations reduced the error of vote-share predictions by 51%. Compared with prediction markets, error was reduced by 6%. In other words, citizen forecasts appear to be the most accurate individual method for forecasting US presidential elections available to date (Graefe, 2014).
Methodology
Responses to the vote expectation questions cannot be directly used as vote-share forecasts. In order to translate the results to forecasts of the vote shares, Graefe (2014) estimated a vote equation based on 217 surveys conducted between 1932 and 2012. Here is the updated equation, including data from the 2016 and 2020 election:
V = 41.4 + 15.9 * E
,
where V is the actual two-party popular vote share of the incumbent party and E
is the two-party percentage of survey respondents that expect the incumbent party candidate to win. That is, the incumbent starts out with 41.4% of the vote, plus a share that depends on people’s expectations. If respondents expect the incumbent to win increases by 10 percent, the incumbent’s vote share increases by 1.6 percentage points.
The vote equation reflects this as it predicts that the incumbent would receive at least 41 percent of the vote, even if nobody expected him to win the election (E = 0). Conversely, if all survey respondents expected the incumbent to win (E = 1), the model would predict the incumbent to receive at maximum about 57 percent of the vote, much in line with:
“no matter how bad the campaign goes for a party, it can count on receiving about 40 percent of the two-party vote; no matter how well a campaign goes for a party, it will receive no more than about 60 percent of the two-party vote.”
James E. Campbell