The video provides an in-depth analysis of how predicting election outcomes has become increasingly complex over time. It delves into the changes in polling since the 2016 US presidential election, where issues arose from an underestimation of the Trump vote. The discussion also covers efforts to rectify these biases through large-scale projects conducted by institutions like Stanford and Yale, which include massive panel studies and examining voter records to confirm actual voting, rather than just reported intent.

Viewers will benefit from understanding the impact of ideological sorting between political parties and how this affects prediction models, making elections closer and harder to forecast. The historical shifts in party dynamics since the 1930s are discussed, highlighting how these changes have influenced voter perceptions and biases. Within this context, the role of economic models has diminished as partisan perceptions increasingly influence how voters view the economy.

Main takeaways from the video:

Please remember to turn on the CC button to view the subtitles.

Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. systematic [ˌsɪstəˈmætɪk] - (adjective) - Done or acting according to a fixed plan or system; methodical. - Synonyms: (methodical, organized, planned)

In 2016 and 2020, error is not random, it's systematic.

2. ideology [ˌaɪdiˈɒlədʒi] - (noun) - A comprehensive set of beliefs or ideas that forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy. - Synonyms: (doctrine, philosophy, credo)

This is party by ideology in 1980.

3. heterogeneous [ˌhɛtərəʊˈdʒiːniəs] - (adjective) - Diverse in character or content. - Synonyms: (diverse, mixed, varied)

Now you can see the Republican Party is even kind of more heterogeneous in the sense that they have conservatives, they're more conservatives, but there's still quite a bit of moderates and some liberals.

4. polarization [ˌpoʊlərɪˈzeɪʃən] - (noun) - Division into two sharply contrasting groups or sets of opinions or beliefs. - Synonyms: (division, separation, schism)

And it's not just continued. That polarization and that divisiveness has gotten worse.

5. deflator [dɪˈfleɪtər] - (noun) - A statistical factor used to convert current dollar production into constant dollar GDP. - Synonyms: (index, economic adjuster)

Growth of GDP deflator in the first 15 quarters.

6. incumbent [ɪnˈkʌmbənt] - (adjective / noun) - Necessary for someone as a duty or responsibility (adj); the holder of an office or post (noun). - Synonyms: (current, present, existing)

And the point is that the economy's doing well. What happens is voters reward the incumbent president's party.

7. perceptions [pərˈsɛpʃənz] - (noun) - The way in which something is regarded, understood, or interpreted. - Synonyms: (view, understanding, impression)

Here's perceptions of the economy

8. turnout [ˈtɜːrnaʊt] - (noun) - The number of people who attend or participate in an event, especially voting. - Synonyms: (attendance, participation, showing)

The 2020 presidential election had the highest turnout in an American election since the early 20th century.

9. engaged [ɪnˈɡeɪdʒd] - (verb) - Occupied or busy with something. - Synonyms: (involved, occupied, busy)

How many American troops are engaged abroad in conflict.

10. perspectives [pərˈspɛktɪvz] - (noun) - A particular attitude toward or way of regarding something; a point of view. - Synonyms: (viewpoints, outlooks, stances)

And in a market, if you think the debate went one way or the other, bam, you could put money in and bet instantaneously.

“The 2024 US Elections — Where We Are Now,” Professor David Brady

I'm not sure. I was trying to figure out what I should call this. And what I really wanted to call it was why doing this has gotten so much harder over time. And so that's what I want to start with. So I'm going to start with polls. So here's the 2016 general election, Trump versus Clinton. And you can see that Clinton won by 2.1 the popular vote. And we were off. We had her winning by a couple of one and a half to two points better. And so when I say we in this case talk about pollsters in general, but in a specific case, this is YouGov economist poll, of which I am not a part, I'm not a participant in the sense of I don't get any money off, but I am a consultant with them and work on their data sets.

Then in 2020, we tried to fix that bias. We didn't. The polls had Trump. The polls had Biden up by seven points and he won by 4.4. So again, we didn't have it fixed. Okay, so then the third thing, so what's happening today? This is Harris. This is after Biden's gone. So this is Harris and it's very close. So what did. So if we're wrong, so what did we do? So what did we do? First thing is poll said, what do we do to fix this Trump? In other words, the error was not random. In 2016 and 2020, error is not random, it's systematic. We're underestimating the Trump vote. So what do we do? Well, we have a project called Stanford, Arizona State and Yale called say, and we have the largest single poll ever conducted. We have a panel study which means it's the same people. We can track individuals over time.

And we have 120,000 people in that poll. We have polled them six times so far. We'll poll them another six times, two or three times before the election, then immediately after the election and a couple follow ups. So in addition to making the sample much larger, the second thing we did was we went in and got Vote Smart so that we checked whether the people in our sample have actually voted. They say that a lot of people say they vote and they don't, but we know who voted and who didn't because you can get that out of the public record. And the third thing we did was we increased. When we looked at the 2020 results, it looked us like what we'd done wrong was we didn't have enough rural voters. So now we have 7,000 more rural voters. So in addition to the 120,000 polls, we also, we do Stanford has the first week and we have a poll of 7,500 people. Again a panel. Then Arizona State has 7,500 there 7,500.

Then Yale has theirs and then we combine into joint ones. So we have four polls once every week, 7,500 same people for Stanford, same people, so we can make comparisons. And then the big poll. So how did we come to this sort of difficulty? And this is Gallup polls from 1937 to 2024. And as you can see, the Democrats were the dominant party. That's the blue line. Democrats are the dominant party for quite a bit of time. There's a drop off in the 60s and that drop off in the 60s is the result of the civil rights movement. Civil rights legislations passed by the Democrats and some southern states go Republican at that point. But the big change is in the 1980s with Reagan. And over time.

Here's what happened in the 80s. First, because of the depression, the Democrats always had the advantage in terms whenever there was an economic crisis, people thought the go to party was the Democrats because they'd fixed it. In the 80s that disappears. Now neither party has that advantage. So that's gone. And the second thing is the cultural issue. The Republican Party had been the party that had the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. In the second, the Republican Party until Reagan had been a party where more Republicans were pro choice than Democrats, Democrats were the more conservative party. And that switched over that time period also. So parties got closer. And what caused that this is party by ideology in 1980. And what you should look at the blue line is Democrats and these people a Democrat, Democrats.

Blue is liberal. So you can see that the Democratic Party is pretty liberal, but they got a lot of moderates and some conservatives on the left. Now you can see the Republican Party is even kind of more heterogeneous in the sense that they have conservatives, they're more conservatives, but there's still quite a bit of moderates and some liberals. Now look, and the party sort, what happens with Reagan is the parties sort. Liberals move away from the Republican Party into the Democratic into the Democratic Party and vice versa. So here's that thing in 2024, that's the line there. So what's happened is the Democratic Party is a liberal party and it is a party that has more heterogeneous than the Republican Party because there are more moderates. But the Republican Party is overwhelmingly conservative with about 16, 18% moderates. And then if you look at independents, they've always stayed the same.

They're moderate and they're less concerned about politics, less likely to vote, don't know as much about politics. So what's happened is the parties have sorted. And in terms of that sorting, it makes all kinds of things hard. I can't go into the whole list of all of those, but it means elections are closer and harder to compromise, so on, so forth that happens. And that's. So that makes, that makes elections harder to predict. So it used to be easier. There used to be an economic equation. This is the Ray Fair model. There are a lot of them you can expect. Academics messed around with the joint, but if you just knew the real growth of real GDP in the first three quarters, growth of GDP deflator in the first 15 quarters, and the number of good news quarters where growth was over 3.2, okay, then this is an amazing result.

This is the prediction rate for that model. You don't know anything. All you know is how the economy's doing. And the point is that the economy's doing well. What happens is voters reward the incumbent president's party, whether they're running again or whether. Or whoever it is, they reward the incumbent party, and the elections predict exceedingly well. That was great. You could just put the equations up, run the stuff, say, here's a winner, unfortunately. And then there was a model. There was a couple errors in that model. So Doug Hibbs at Harvard came up with the bread and Peace model, where he adds to. That adds to the economic model. He adds, how many foreign troops are. How many American troops are engaged abroad in conflict, and that then the model works even better. These slides, by the way, are available to.

I make them available to anybody. Now, what's happened to that economic model? Here's the 2012 election. That blue line is Democrats who say, how's the economy? The Democrats say, it's great. Look at Republicans technical term, it sucks. So, and the economy wasn't bad. And here's my favorite, this is 2016. In October, 65 before the election, 65% of Democrats thought that the economy was doing well. 20% and only 20% of Republicans thought that in December, after the election, before Trump is sworn in, look at the jump. Now, Republicans, 70% of Republicans think the economy is doing well, and about 10, 15% of Democrats think it's doing well. So if people are basing their view of what happens in the economy and their vote, and it's now partisan, those economic models no longer predict.

They're just off they don't work anymore. So that makes it worse. And here's by the way, the latest one. I just got this from YouGov the Economist yesterday. Here's perceptions of the economy. You see on the Left, Democrats, about 10% think it's excellent. And then a huge number of Democrats think it's okay. And now you can see on the far right how the Republicans see the economy. 60% of Democrats think the economy is excellent and good, and 62% of Republic thinks it poor. Okay, so that leads you to say is just another example that's continued. And it's not just continued. That polarization and that divisiveness has gotten worse. And that extends to so many things that I can't go into perception of the parties. I think I'm going to try and remember this. Yeah. So Democrats, Democrats think that 47% of Republicans make more than $250,000 a year, and they think most of them are old, way off. And on the other hand, Republicans think like 30% of Democrats are LGBTQ.

The perceptions are unbelievable. And when you ask people, if you ask people, what if your son, daughter comes home and wants to marry a Republican or a Democrat, not good. Not good. So that's the world we live in. So now I want to turn to the state of the race and these polls, these polls are from the surveys I talked about. This is from the, say, Stanford, Arizona State, Yale poll, combination of either the 7500 ones or the 120,001. When we get to the end, where we actually talk about what's going to happen in terms of the states, then It'll be the 120,000 poll. And I've left you with our estimate of where each of the 50 states is, and you're welcome to those. So, so where are we today? So on the left, and this is tracing individuals. Okay, so this is Biden versus Trump. And you can see that after that debate, right before the drum line after the debate, Trump is winning two, three points.

And if you think about from our perspective, did we get the gap right? Well, now we got a gap that shows Harris is up by two points, but now Trump's up by three. So he could be up by five or six. So it could be big, big Trump win. So then of course, what happens in the second half over there is Harris comes in, but I want you to know, when she starts out, she's about where Biden was. And then she slowly picks up. Where'd she pick up? She didn't gain anything among Republicans. Did a little bit better among independents. But the reason she came back up is because after Biden, that period where you see the drop up, but where he's falling down, what happens is the Democrats started moving to saying, we're for third party candidates. There are many more votes for rfk. There's more votes for other candidates, and a lot of Democrats saying, I'm not sure, I don't know. And so what happens to tighten the race up again quickly is those Democrats come back, they're now enthused about it, they sort of like her, and you can see that she's picked it up.

And then you're in the polls where we are right now, where Harris looks like she has. So if you look at real clear politics, average, if you look at 538 average, and the reason you average those polls, the reason they do it, is because if there's air in all of them, if you average out over them, you have a better perspective. And in all of them, she's ahead. So what else did she do? This is an election, by the way, Trump versus Biden that large numbers of Americans did not wish to see. Pardon? This is just the polls for everybody. We're getting there. We're getting there. We're getting there. Don't jump ahead. We got time to fill, and you're not. And you're not backbenchers, and I'm not getting paid. So no jumping ahead. Yeah. Okay. So there are double haters. There were a huge number of double haters. Double haters. I don't want either one of them drawn. And that condition. So as you can see, one thing the Harris candidates, the candidacy did was the number of double haters dropped pretty much.

So it made the race tighter again. It made the race viable. And so that's where we were on that. Now, how about the debates, everybody? How many watched the first, the Biden debate? How long did you stay? I couldn't. I left. Yeah, I left early. Okay, so winning the debate, these are numbers. So we polled. This is a separate poll. We had polled 30,000 people before the debate, during the debate, after the debate, day after, and two days after the debate. And so who won the debate for Democrats, 30% thought Biden would win. That's right. So Biden. There was a 16% drop. People thought. People thought he actually lost. And then on the Harris debate, you can see that people thought Harris won and Trump dropped, which both. Both reasonable. Right. In short, the data showed what people thought. Trump won the first debate and Harris won the second debate. Doesn't mean you're winning votes. Here's the change. Democrats, if you're a Democrat and Biden lost, you suddenly thought, oh, gee, Trump's a great candidate.

I think I'll vote for him. Didn't happen. They didn't move. And look at the numbers for Harris. Harris, Trump, people said what? 0, 0, 0 minus 1. So winning the debate didn't do much for you. And so that's another thing that makes this election. Don't say that makes this election hard is almost nothing changes. You check the poll, boom, boom, boom. There's very little movement. So there you are. It's just once people are set like this and they're polarized, it's hard to move. It's hard to move people, but you can change minds. Polls do a little. Not the polls, but the debate. First debate, it took a couple weeks for it to happen, but was Biden too old? Went from 64 to 70. And ultimately, as you know, that's what did him in. As Democratic House candidates, Pelosi and others kept coming to him and saying, this is not good. You're not doing well. And so they finally, finally got him to it.

And Trump, after the debate, first debate, there are about 3% more who thought that Trump was too old. And a little bit, little change in that. And the thing. All right, so then what about issues? So really, basically, when you think about it, right, there's only three places you can get votes. You can get votes from your base, which is members. If you're a Democrat, you vote Democrat, Republican, you vote Republican, you get defectors, Democrats who switch, Republicans who switch, and you get Independents. That's it. There's no other place to get votes. So how did Harris do among it? So one of the questions we ask is, which of the candidates do you think would be better at handling this issue? And so that's this tale. And so you can see on abortion, Harris has the advantage over Trump. On the issue of the economy, then Trump has the advantage over Harris.

And on immigration, it's the largest. I'm going to come back a little bit later to people who think this is the most important issue rather than this general. Who do you think would manage it better? So you can see that Harris does better than these figures. Harris, compared to Biden, she's doing much better than Biden did. But the bottom line is on abortion, she's doing well. But on the economy and on immigration, she is seen as not as able as Trump to deal with this now. So given that this is all so close. And the question then is, well, what if we're wrong on the polls? What if we continue to underestimate the Trump vote? Then we'd be wrong. So I made two other efforts to try and deal this. Don't worry, we're still, we're going to get to those real states, the efforts. So the first effort I wanted to make was just the basic one I just told you about.

There's three places you can get votes. We know Biden won in 2020. And so if you look at that, Democrats, 95.7% of Democrats voted for Biden. Only 2.5% of Democrats voted for Trump, whereas 5.2% of Republicans voted for Biden. And there's the other candidates fell away. And among independents, you can see that among independents, Biden was close. Was close. So that's within our margin of error. So he could have split them, but the point is they're close. Now, if we look at 2024, understanding Harris is carrying Democrats 95, 1, and she's getting a few more votes from the Republicans than Trump is getting from Democrats, but not as much as Biden. And then among independents, she's down nine, ten points. So what? So then. So I thought, that's great. It doesn't help. It doesn't help me at all because it says, yeah, she's not as good as where Biden was, but is it good enough? Don't know.

So then I looked at issues, these issues, I rank from 1 through 5. Inflation was, for Americans in general, the most important issue. Democrats it was 13% of Democrats said that was the most important issue to them. I have nothing for the Democrats in two because only 2% of Democrats said immigration was a problem. Jobs in the economy about 10, democracy democrats thought about 14 and abortion about 8. So each, if you think of these issues. So on the inflation issue, if you go back to that previous table, if you're a Democrat and you're concerned about inflation is the most important issue, instead of having 95% Democratic support, she has 89. And if you're a Democrat who cares about the jobs and the economy, it goes to 98%. And if you're a Democrat who's concerned about democracy as an issue, then it's 100%. And on abortion, it goes about the same thing.

So those issues of jobs in the economy, democracy and abortion help her Democratic vote. The only way, the only place where she gets votes from Republicans is on the abortion issue. So if you're a Republican, about 6% of Republicans said Abortion was the most important issue to them. Then instead of her getting 3.2, she gets an additional. She gets about 14% more. She gets about 18%. But remember, it's only about 6% of Republicans that say that abortion. But here's where the problem is on independence. So independence, if inflation, which is the most important issue, she loses 17.4% on immigration, which is I think 13%, 12 or 13% for independence, she loses big there. So the only place she gains is democracy and the other two. But those first three issues, the economic issues, are bigger than the others. So it looks on the issue like there's a slight net gain at this point for Trump.

So again, having done this, I still couldn't come forward and say, okay, here's the winner. So now I went finally to the age gaps between 20. There's four major gaps in American politics. Gender, age, race and education. So what I'm doing here because you don't want to have really complicated table. So what I simply did was I looked at the Biden coalition in 2020. I looked at the gap. How much did Biden win men among how much did he win women by? And so you. And then I compare it to where Biden was. So this is what's happening in 2024 and men and gap between men, Harris versus Harris, Biden terms of. But same. But on women, it looks like she has an advantage over Biden and that that might get to 13, 14%. Some people have it at 13, we don't. But it could, it could grow over the next couple weeks.

So it is in double digits. So the gap, more women are voting for Harris than women who voted for Biden. On age, we did under 30, 30 to 44, 45 to 64. And on each of these groups, she's doing just a little bit less. A little bit less. Well, they did not much within the margin of error, but a little less. And frankly, it took me a long time to sit there and say less because it could have been. But I went with less because it was slightly less. Point, point and a half less. What about the gaps on race and education? Well, here's one of the big ones. On whites, she's even on blacks, she has a 60 point gap that is 60%. If you look at when you poll black African Americans, what you get is that It's a gap 60% more. So it's 70 to 10 means 70% as opposed to 10 or whatever.

That's the gap is 60 points. So 60% more blacks are voting for Harris than are voting for Trump. But that's less, a bit less than Biden had. And I'm sure you've heard the percentage of African American males that are voting for Trump this time or say they're voting for Trump is about 12 to 14%. And that's higher. And that's what's causing that. Among other and here's the big one, Hispanics. That Hispanic gap, it was really big in Hillary. Hillary had a huge advantage in the Hispanic vote that dropped in 2020. It dropped in two places. It dropped in Miami Dade. And the major place it dropped was all along the Texas border. There were swings along the Texas border of up to 20 points away from Democrats to the Republicans. And that gap in the same places, that gap has grown a little bit at gaps grown in the 2024 election.

So and there's a slight gain in the Asian American vote. Now on education, this is again, Democrats used to win the high school are less focused. That was the kind of blue collar union vote. And Trump has split that 2016, 2020 and 2024. There's a gap and the gap now favors Republicans. The high school or less are much more likely to vote Republican. And the flip is on the other side where college graduates and especially College plus are much more Democratic than they used to be. So if you look down at that one, it's high school, the gap is still around 12, 13 points in regard to some college. If you have some college but not college, that vote is that's a little bit pro Trump. But among College plus, there's a gain, there's a gain for Harris. So once again, going through all that left you with the same result as the poll.

Are we right or wrong? Who knows? All right, so now what follows is we're doing the seven states that matter. Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. You can tell I've done this before. And so this is a techie audience. So this is what we did. It's a multilevel regression with post stratification. It's an MRP model, three stages. We estimate the likelihood of voting conditional upon voting. What is the probability of voting for a major party or third party candidate? And finally, predict support for Harris and Trump among major party voters. I leave you, I'm just going to skip ahead to this and I'll come back. I leave you this table. You can get it and look it up and blow it up. I was damned if I was doing any more with it. I typed that up. So anyway, that is our we'll do another one in two weeks. But that's at that point, that's our best, best estimate of where we are.

So now here, what are the states that matter? And I know there are a lot of polls out there, New York Times, Siena, not to knock them, but when they say, somebody came up to me before and said, there's a recent poll that shows Trump's ahead in all seven states, those polls have like four or five hundred voters. In those states, we have thousands. So I'm betting on ours. Unless we're wrong. Well, I mean, I don't think we're. All right. Sorry. So here's where we have it. Nevada, we have Harris up 50, 48. Margin of error, we have. In Arizona, we have Harris and Trump in a dead tie. In North Carolina, we have Trump up by one. In Pennsylvania, we have Harris up by one. And in Georgia, we have Trump up one. And in Michigan, there we have not in the margin of error, we have Michigan and Wisconsin at three points or more. So that's not the margin of error. So I think I would say their head in this one.

So given that, what is the only thing that matters? The Electoral College, what happens there? So this is where we get to it. Scenario number one, the polls are underestimating. So if we underestimate Trump's support by one or two points, then he's going to win most of the states he did in 2016, and he's going to win. This is if he takes all of those states. He didn't take Nevada, but if he takes all of those states that show up that way, then he won 306, 232. I don't think that will happen. But that's the scenario on that side. Now, what about the narrowest possible scenario? So this is she holds the blue wall, and the blue wall is Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. If she holds the blue wall, then going, this is so great. Then going in, going in, she has 269 votes and he has 268, as you know, or may not Michigan, not Michigan, but Nevada, Nebraska and Maine don't do their vote by winner take all.

They do it by congressional district. So Maine, which has four votes and one and two districts. District two is rural and Republican. So Maine was three to one Biden and Nebraska is five, and Nebraska, three congressional districts. The second district is Omaha. That district was carried by Biden five, six points. There was some redistricting making it closer. But on this scenario where she retains the blue wall, then what happens is that if Trump carries the second district, it's 269, 269 tie goes to the House of Representatives, mean Trump wins because in the House of Representatives, each state gets one vote. So Wyoming is one and California is one. And so given that we're only Trump wins. So it could come down to the second district of Nebraska. What a great way to decide elections. Okay, now this is what I, this is my view of what's, what's more likely. And this is, this is not based on the model I've and a couple say, I think Trump will take Arizona and I think he'll take Georgia. I think that Michigan and Wisconsin will go to, will go to Harris. And then I think the key states are North Carolina and Pennsylvania and Nevada. If she loses Nevada, that's big trouble because Nevada is the one swing state that's all during all this period voted Democrat, voted for Hillary and so on, so forth. So Nevada, if she loses Nevada, then she's going to lose Pennsylvania too. I think so.

So that's the way I have it. And now you're down to questions of ground game. Democrats have a better ground game. They have more people on the ground in Pennsylvania and Nevada and North Carolina than the Republicans do. And the Republicans strategy was to pay a firm to go out and do this, and they're doing that. But in the last few days they've started to panic and so they're shipping volunteers in. And how that works out, hard to tell. I do know that we do have some research on, in 2016 and 2020, a lot of Californians went to other states to try and convince people it didn't work too well. Well, imagine you're saying you're in, well, some just, you're in Georgia. Yeah, I'm from California. I'm here to encourage you. Yeah, good, good. See ya. So that hasn't worked very well. So we don't know. So we don't know about that. And that and in a state where differences are small, it's, the other thing is North Carolina, I did a map of North Carolina, the areas where there was that were hardest hit by the flood and more electricity outage for a longer time period, they're heavily, heavily, they're the most heavily Republican areas in the state. Now in the past when we had hurricanes, tornadoes, et cetera, et cetera, that depresses turnout in those areas.

So, and a state's going to be decided by less than 1%, 1% of the vote, that could matter. So we just, we just can't, we just can't know it's going to turn on all kinds of factors like that that we don't, we don't have any, we don't have any control over. All right, so now here's, here's another depressed. So we've been trying, we went, we went and spent a lot of time measuring called persuadables. And so normally people, the way they get normal when they do it normally pulses just go, okay. People who say, I'm undecided, that's the people who are persuaded. We didn't do that. When we did the poll and asked, who are you voting for in a trial heat, are you voting for Harris or Trump? We followed up with a question to say, even if you voted for Trump, would you consider Harris? Anybody that said yes, we put him in the persuadable and vice versa. So, and that number has been falling. And so look at those numbers. Harris Definitely 40.1.

Definitely Trump 39, 5. Lean Harris 0.8. Lean Trump 1. Maybe Harris 6. Maybe Trump 6.3. So I looked at who these persuadables are. They're moderates, 85% of them are independents and they are the least likely to vote. So we have a much harder time predicting whether they'll vote or not. So even if we get down to the persuadables like that, it's still kind of flip it up. You see what a great time we're having now. I gave a talk in San Francisco to some venture capitalists and hedge funds people and they wanted to talk about this poly market deal. All. You know what poly market is? It's a cryptocurrency market that bets a lot of money on politics. And this is the cryptocurrency 5941 Trump. That big bump toward the end turns out to be a Republican donor that put about four and a half million dollars in there. So, so I wouldn't, I wouldn't bet on that.

I mean, there are some advantages to betting pools like that, right? The advantages. It's kind of like a market. If so if there's a debate, we've got a poll, but it's a day or two before we get that poll and put it out. And in a market, if you think the debate went one way or the other, bam, you could put money in and bet instantaneously. And so that's some advantage. I don't have the numbers on this, but I do think better than the poly market is Goldman Sachs. For the first time, I think it's. Goldman Sachs has put together A Trump basket and a Harris basket of stocks. And they're looking at the stock. And interestingly, the good thing about that was on the Harris and on the Trump basket, they didn't go up after the debate. So these guys I was giving the talk to, they were so why shouldn't it have gone up? And the point is then I showed them the data. So well, it didn't change anybody and the market was pretty good. They knew it didn't change anybody. But in the last few days, we don't know why the Trump basket, including his X, the Twitter alternative, that has been going up.

So again, I don't know. But if I was, if I wanted to count on one of those, I'd count on the Goldman Sachs. I think that the Goldman Sachs and we can't go back and predict how they did. They didn't have it in 2020 or 2016. And you can't bet on polymarket, but of course you can. There's instructions on how you could do it with cryptocurrency. And then the last, toward the end, remember the, at the end, don't think it's going to be over easily because what's going to happen is the same thing that happened in 2020. Mostly Democrats voted online. So during the election, when the tails are coming in, Republicans voted on election day, those votes are counterfeit. So let me give you an example of Pennsylvania. Trump was ahead early until 11, 12 o'clock at night. He was ahead in Pennsylvania. The reason being Pennsylvania has a rule that says you cannot count mail in ballots until election day. And now that's changed because now they can postmark them a few days later. So this is a poll that.

So in our polls, some states have already started to vote. So in the last Stanford poll, there are 512. So and that question is how did you vote post 24? Because they've already voted. So note of the people who've already voted, Harris is winning by 15 points. So you're again gonna have looks to me like gonna have that same phenomenon of Democrats voting in mail or before and Republicans voting on election day. So Election day, it's gonna be, it's gonna be red. Now the people who do this for CBS and so on and so forth, they know all this and they've got that calculated. So their reports take this into account. But you can count on this. And I guess the last thing is you can count on is going to be a while before we know the Republicans are prepared to challenge the vote across the board. And Democrats are prepared for that and ready to go. So lawyers are going to do very well during this period. No MBAs, just lawyers at this time.

Okay. And this is the table that you can. I'm not going through that. This is the 50 states, the only seven that matter I've given you, but that's our estimate. And they'll make the slides available to you and then you can just pull it apart with your fingers. That's it. Thank you. Two part questions. One is how did you, how did you take into account the proportion of people who would actually lie to you to your face in terms of their voting? Since many people I know will not do that for both in the center of the country. We paid a quarter, we paid a quarter of a million dollar to vote alert to go out and check the record of whether they voted or not. So everybody in this poll voted. But when they say that they're going to vote for a particular candidate at this point, many people are hesitant that I know, for example, in the middle of the country that are very, very concerned about their vote potentially being known to their employer, et cetera.

The second point is we don't have much evidence of that. And I don't know very many Trump voters who are quiet about it. If that's, if that's a Trump vote or the other way, generally it's a Trump. Both directions. Yeah. Okay. Both directions. That's possible. That's okay. That's possible. The second is as Jeffrey Pfeffer taught in his class and Mr. Caro pointed out that, you know, the, that Johnson stole his first election by stuffing the ballot box. What mean the 87 boat landslide? Yep, yep. Okay. So my question is, how do you take that into account, if at all? Well, it's hard to do. I mean, people aren't going to tell you. Yeah. By the way, we stole the election. I don't think, I don't think there's, I don't think Trump won. I'm absolutely certain Trump didn't win the last election. Yeah, I know, I know that.

But that's sort of the claim and that's going on. It's very hard. There's a couple of really good websites. One of them is a guy named Justin Grimmer. So if you look up Justin Grimmer, he's at Stanford, he tries to deal with all those questions in a very complicated statistical way. But even it's, it's hard, it's. So just think of it like this. Think of all the mail in ballots. Yeah. Oh, that. Okay, well, all right. Think of all the mail in ballots. Mail in ballots go. We don't know what happens when they're in there. Suppose the, suppose the male head of the household just gets the ballots and marks them off and sends them back. We don't know that. Right. So we just, there's, there's some of that we just don't know. We're not going to. But mail ballots aren't going away. They get more and more popular. So that's a hard question which I've avoided. The answer. Is Elon Musk affecting the election? Is Elon Musk affecting the election? Geez.

These are questions I have no answer. Well, he, you know, that little, that little bump in Polymarket, the one that went up, that's the same day as he made his comment for Trump on October 7th. So it's possible on that. But no, I don't. What we know about celebrity endorsements is that, thank God, they don't make much difference. So we didn't test Elon Musk, but we did spend, in my view, an inordinate amount of time on Taylor Swift. And I would have never even known who she was if I didn't watch Kansas City football. But we found no evidence that, with a lot of stuff, we found no evidence that that was affecting turnout among young people. We couldn't find any of it. Like, yes, and then I can't all cross. So you get the next one, you go and then over there. Okay, so thank you for all the humor in your presentation. So I'm from Russia and I had an economics degree and I studied corruption and elections.

Theoretically, you know, my thesis was about it. So we use votes flow model to compare election with another election by the smallest electoral regions. So There are like 100,000 regions in Russia. All the data is public and you can correlate how people change their votes from one election to another. So in this American election, we'll have one candidate, same candidate in three different elections. So you can in theory use that voter flow models and see, see how, you know, people change their behavior statistically, you know, from one voting region to another. So do you study these kind of models? We have done that. But in this particular case, since we went out and verified the 2020 vote and the 2024, when I looked at the gap and the difference between the 2020, that was by individual. So we can track, because it's the same people, I can track over this election cycle exactly what's happening to voters and who's changing. So that, and we can't go back to 2016 and do that.

But we can. We did with the 2020. We know they voted in 2020. We know Biden won in 2020 and the numbers. So we can trace that. And so it's a form of that. But you could do that. But we think this is a better way. Do you see what is known as the Bradley factor happening this year? Well, the Bradley. So the Bradley effect is. No, we don't. But the Bradley effect was as follows. There was an election where Bradley, who was African American mayor of Los Angeles, he was running against DukeMajian for governor of California. Part of the Bradley problem was that in those days, the interviews were done face to face, which no longer done because. And if you had, if there were African American interviewers, people would not say that they weren't going to vote for Bradley. And that's allegedly. That's one story about the Bradley effect and why it doesn't work now. But we have very little effect of the. We have very little. When we try and look pretty hard for that, we don't get much of an effect. So when we looked at where we went wrong in 2020, it was one of the things we looked at. The thing that looked to us like it was the most plausible explanation for why we missed it was we didn't have enough rural voters. Now we do, and we'll see. So.

Yes, ma'am. Hi, I'm an American who's lived overseas for 20 years. And increasingly the view of the US is that it's more and more unsafe. Why isn't public safety and gun control more of an issue? Well, because it's. The main reason is it's sorted. It's sorted. California has rules that don't apply in New York. And in Montana, John Tester has a tough race in Montana, the Senate this time. And if John Tester in Montana, who's a Democrat, if he came out and said, well, I don't think gun control, he's gone. And so control of the Senate hangs on a few states like that. And the second thing is the issue is more complicated. The states that have the most guns, Montana, per capita guns, don't have that higher murder rate. Turns out they have a very high suicide rate with guns. But that's a separate problem. So there's three problems with guns, right?

One, there's the problem of suicide, One, there's a problem of guns, violent death. And third, there's the terrorism problem on that. And it's sort of sorted by public opinion. And in politics, you wouldn't win many votes. People's minds are set in those areas and you can't cross it. And that's also part of the rather strange American electoral system. In a European system where everybody votes on one day and it's pretty simple and it's over. I think you could take. I'll give you one, Australia did an unbelievable job with gun control. They went back and they bought back guns and they put, they passed the law and they said the guns and the violence rate has gone way down. Given the American system of 50 states, checks and balances not going to happen in the short run, sad to say. Oh, here I'll give you the prediction. I didn't do this for the House and the Senate based on these models of the 120,000 because we have enough to do congressional districts, the probability the Senate goes Republican is about 0.7. West Virginia is gone, meaning West Virginia will go Republican after Manchin's retirement.

And then the next most likely state is Montana with Tester it looks to me if I had to bet, I would say The Senate is 51 49. Brown In Ohio, it's closed but he looks like he's a little bit ahead. Rousin in Nevada, that Senate seat looks okay and same across the upper Midwest. And the one in Pennsylvania is a little closer but the Republicans are 52 would be max I think. And the House we have the probability at about 6.65 Democrat. So you would have. And the reason for that is the competitive seats, the ones that are going to switch it, there are five in New York and five or six in California and those are trending Democratic at the moment and it doesn't take very many votes to switch it. Thank you. Terrific presentation. So my question is based on your experience or your gut, what is the impact of polls on actual voter turnout and decisions?

So if it, you know, if we're a weekend and it's really close, does that mean more people are going to vote? Does that help the Republicans more the Democrats? If one side is weighing that lead, does that actually hurt them because people feel they don't need to go out and vote. Just your general thoughts on that. It's a really complicated question. There are a bunch of papers that have mixed, they're very mixed findings on that. So as you know, on election night you can't reveal any of the post election polls. When people are coming out of the polls after having voted, it could have some effect. But the problem in 2016, I mean 2020 in this election is going to be that Trump is a gigantic turnout machine. He turns out Republican voters and he turns out democratic voters. The 2020 presidential election had the highest turnout in an American election since the early 20th century. And the 2022 election had the highest congressional turnout since 1960 or 1910.

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