How to Predict Who Will Win the Next Election

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Mr. Beat explains the secret formula for predicting who wins American presidential elections.

Thanks to @LetsTalkElections for collaborating with me! Check out Ethan's video here

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Ok so what’s the most important outcome determining an election?

No matter what the election is, even this one, what people care about the most is whether or not they can put food on the table, and if you just look at the economic data, you can almost always predict who will actually get elected.

But which economic data? Well first of all, we only have fairly reliable economic data since the 1940s. Second, it’s always about comparing that data...comparing data from the election year to the data from the year BEFORE the election. So what do we look at?

Nate Silver once put together a set of 43 economic indicators and ranked them by how reliable they were predicting the next President. At the top of the list? The ISM manufacturing index.

(nodding) Obviously….the ISM manufacturing index...wait what’s the ISM manufacturing index?

Apparently that’s a way to measure manufacturing activity based on a monthly survey by the Institute for Supply Management, or ISM. Ok, who are these folks taking this survey? Purchasing managers at more than 300 manufacturing companies.

So is it safe to say that if the ISM manufacturing index has gone up since the last election, then the incumbent gets re-elected? And if it’s gone down, the challenging candidate gets elected? Well, not quite.

Silver admitted that all of those indicators were individually not that great at predicting who would win the election. However, we do still have some economic rules that work quite well.

First, there’s the real GDP per capita growth rule, which basically is that the incumbent political party usually wins if the growth rate of real GDP per capita is increasing at a higher rate in the election year compared to the previous year. Well, it’s been going down since last year. That doesn’t bode well for President Trump. Now wait a second, what about the Misery Index Rule?

The Misery Index Rule says the incumbent usually wins if The Misery Index has not gone up in the election year compared to the previous year. Wait Misery Index? That sounds like something from a Stephen King book. The Misery Index is simply adding together the rate of inflation and the unemployment rate.

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