A Political History Forecast of Campaign 2024

• In Event: Forecasting the 2024 US Presidential Election

Abstract

Statesman and scholar Alexis de Tocqueville once noted, "History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies."[1] In other words, history has a habit of repeating itself, and we can deduce cycles and patterns that will likely recur. Such stability and inertia should bode well for prediction. Yet, when it comes to election forecasting, especially in the US, most prognostications rely on short-term political fundamentals measuring macroeconomic performance or government or leader popularity. In this contribution, we adopt a structural approach but depart from existing literature by focusing on historical party and governance dynamics in the vein of de Tocqueville to establish if they can offer solid guidance as to the performance of the Democratic Party in US Congressional and Presidential elections. Our ex-post models provide reasonable predictions of the Democratic Party's performance in Congressional and Presidential elections between 1946 and 2022, thereby creating conditions to assume that historical dynamics may be helpful in forecasting the 2024 contest.

Authors

• Michael S. Lewis-Beck, University of Iowa

• Stephen Patrick Quinlan, GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences