Democracy & Elections

My Electoral Forecast Model

Benjamin Wittes
Sunday, September 4, 2016, 9:05 AM

Okay, this has nothing to do with national security law or policy. What's more, this is way, way outside my area of expertise. But I have this feeling that this may be of interest to some Lawfare readers, so I'm going to post it to this site once and then never mention it here again: I've developed a super-crude electoral forecast model.

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Okay, this has nothing to do with national security law or policy. What's more, this is way, way outside my area of expertise. But I have this feeling that this may be of interest to some Lawfare readers, so I'm going to post it to this site once and then never mention it here again: I've developed a super-crude electoral forecast model.

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Here's my post on Facebook about it:

And here's the underlying spreadsheet.

I mean to keep the forecast updated throughout the election as an experiment to see how this sort of super-simple model performs against more elaborate electoral forecasting models like those at FiveThirtyEight and the New York Times.

Enjoy.


Benjamin Wittes is editor in chief of Lawfare and a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of several books.

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