Opinion - What can we learn from election prediction failures of the past?

Off-target predictions about U.S. presidential races have been abundant in recent election cycles. Seldom, however, do prominent miscalls create lasting repercussions for the wayward prognosticator.

A look at the most striking prediction failures in presidential elections this century suggests as much.

Revisiting erroneous predictions of the recent past is to argue for a measure of accountability, if belated. The cases addressed below each arise from a discrete failing or flaw, such as a premature belief that the election has been decided, a too-eager reliance on dubious indicators such as the prevalence of yard signs, or a willingness to embrace the illusion of precision that polling data readily project.

2000: ‘Bush is toast’

Predicting an election outcome in September can be risky, as Slate.com learned in 2000 when it posted an analysis beneath the headline, “Why Bush is toast.” George W. Bush, the analysis argued, had fallen behind in the polls and had little chance of overtaking then-Vice President Al Gore by Election Day.

“The numbers are moving toward Gore because fundamental dynamics tilt the election in his favor,” wrote the author of the analysis, Will Saletan. “The only question has been how far those dynamics would carry him. Now that he has passed Bush, the race is over.”

Saletan closed his analysis by saying of Bush: “Stick a fork in him. He’s done.”

Bush did, of course, recover, winning the closest and most hotly disputed election in American history on the strength of a narrow victory in Florida, which was settled by a narrow majority of the U.S. Supreme Court.

To his credit, Saletan revisited his failed prediction after the election, opening a detailed postmortem with words seldom uttered by pundits: “I blew it.”

He also offered an observation broadly relevant to all soothsaying about elections.

“Most of us pundits suspect we’re no better at predicting election results than the average intelligent person is,” wrote Saletan, under the clever headline “Burnt toast.” “In my case, there’s now proof.”

2004: An Election Day misfire

John Zogby was the star pollster of presidential elections in 1996 and 2000, estimating the popular vote margins with nearly spot-on accuracy in both races. Those predictions earned him informal sobriquets such as “the country’s hottest pollster.” But election prediction can be a fickle pursuit, as Zogby demonstrated on Election Day 2004.

The day before, in his final election poll, Zogby estimated Bush led Democrat John Kerrey by a single percentage point, 48-47.

Had he left it at that, Zogby would have reconfirmed his reputation for polling accuracy, given that Bush won the popular vote by just 2.4 percentage points.

But Zogby in those days was something of a maverick who didn’t always adhere to polling conventions. On the afternoon of Election Day 2004, Zogby revised his forecast.

He announced Kerry would win the Electoral College with no fewer than 311 votes and carry battleground states such as Florida, Ohio, Iowa and New Mexico, based on what he perceived as a large turnout by young voters.

Kerry lost all those states, and the election.

“I did something I shouldn’t have,” Zogby conceded afterward in remarks to the New York Times. “I am a better pollster than predictor.”

2008: A primary error

The pre-election polls of 2008 were quite accurate, overall, in pegging Barack Obama’s general-election victory over Republican John McCain. Collectively, the polls estimated Obama’s lead late in the campaign at 7.6 percentage points; he won by 7.3 points.

It was the first Democratic primary election, in New Hampshire in January 2008, that flummoxed the pollsters

Polls conducted in the days before the primary were unanimous in pointing to Obama’s hefty lead over Hillary Clinton. Zogby’s final pre-primary survey said Obama was ahead by 13 points.

Clinton won by 2.6 points.

The result “roiled the political world,” the Atlantic observed, “leaving everyone with the question: How could the pollsters have been so wrong?”

The American Association for Public Opinion Research commissioned a study about the performance of polls during the 2008 primary elections and reported several factors that could have distorted the polls in New Hampshire. Among them was a challenge long-familiar to pollsters — that of completing surveys too soon to detect late-campaign shifts in voters’ preferences.

Additionally, the report said, an influx of first-time voters may have confounded pollsters’ assessments of who among their survey respondents was most likely to vote. Identifying likely voters is crucial to accurate election polling and represents another long-standing challenge.

2012: A banner year for failed predictions 

The year of Obama’s reelection to the presidency also was a banner year for failed predictions, especially by conservative pundits and columnists. Karl Rove, for example, wrote that “after the cock crows on the morning” after Election Day 2012, “Mitt Romney will be declared America’s 45th president.” Romney would win “at least 279 electoral votes, probably more,” Rove said in his Wall Street Journal column.

Even more bullish was Michael Barone, a veteran analyst who predicted Romney would win 315 electoral votes and carry Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida, Virginia, New Hampshire, Iowa and Colorado — states Obama had won in 2008. In 2012, Obama won them all again.

But no election miscall in 2012 was quite as memorable as that of Peggy Noonan, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan.

“I think it’s Romney,” she wrote at her blog the day before the election. “I think he’s stealing in ‘like a thief with good tools,’ in Walker Percy’s old words.” Noonan mentioned as a favorable indicator crowds in Ohio and Pennsylvania that seemed genuinely enthusiastic for Romney. Most memorably, Noonan invoked yard signs: “In Florida a few weeks ago I saw Romney signs, not Obama ones. From Ohio I hear the same. From tony Northwest Washington, D.C., I hear the same.”

She declared: “All the vibrations are right” for Romney’s victory.

2016: A vow to ‘eat a bug’

In mid-October 2016, Sam Wang took to Twitter to declare the presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump “totally over.” Were Trump to win even 240 electoral votes — 30 votes short of the threshold for winning the presidency — Wang promised to “eat a bug” on live television.

Wang’s was one of the most extravagant predictions during a campaign of many flubs and miscalls. Natalie Jackson, for example, said her poll-based forecast model for HuffPost gave Clinton a 98.2 percent chance of victory and that Trump had “essentially no path to an Electoral College victory.”

Wang, a neuroscientist at Princeton University, topped even that near-certain prediction. The forecast model of his Princeton Election Consortium gave Clinton a 99 percent chance of winning.

Not long after Trump’s stunning victory, Wang went on a CNN program, bringing with him a small can of gourmet-style crickets intended as pets. “John the Baptist in the wilderness, he ate locusts and honey,” Wang said as he prepared to keep his vow. “So I regard myself as being in the wilderness a little bit because, after all, I was wrong. A lot of people were wrong, but nobody else made the promise I did.”

With that, Wang dug out a dollop of cricket and popped it in his mouth.

2020: The landslide that wasn’t

Talk of a landslide — an overwhelming repudiation of Trump’s presidency and its fumbling response to the COVID pandemic — was much in the air in the weeks and months before the 2020 election.

James Carville, the Democratic strategist and outspoken commentator, went on MSNBC in late June 2020 to say that Trump’s prospects were so bleak that he ought to be advised to quit the race. “There’s no chance he’s going to be reelected,” Carville declared, adding: “He’s lost control over everything [in the country]…It’s gone. It’s gone. And somebody’s going to have to go tell this guy, ‘Look, you just can’t risk the humiliating defeat that’s going to come your way.’”

Such assessments seemed supported by prominent pre-election polls — notably those conducted for CNN. By early October 2020, CNN reported, Joe Biden had opened a lead of 16 percentage points over Trump. Later in the month, in its final poll before the election, CNN said Biden’s polling lead was 12 points, still the largest advantage any national pollster reported in the runup to the election, according to RealClearPolitics.

A double-digit margin of victory would qualify as a landslide — an outcome not seen in a U.S. presidential election since in 1984, when Ronald Reagan defeated Walter Mondale by 18 points.

But there was no landslide in 2020, in what was election polling’s worst overall performance in 40 years. Biden won the popular vote by 4.5 points. But the race was actually a lot closer than that. A well-placed shift of just 43,000 votes from Biden to Trump in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin would have produced a 269-269 tie in the Electoral College.

These cases together remind us that error stalks even the most confident of forecasts and that elite opinion is not always astute or discerning. In such reminders, there is no small value.

Likewise, they emphasize that impressions, “vibrations” and polls signaling landslides can be unsound bases for forecasting outcomes of presidential elections, especially in these days of a polarized U.S. electorate.

They also reveal something about the appeal of prognostication despite the prospect that forecasts will often go sideways. Offering an election prediction implies that this time will be different, that this time the prediction won’t fail. But as these cases attest, that’s not necessarily so.

W. Joseph Campbell is a professor emeritus at American University in Washington, D.C., and author of seven books, including most recently, “Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections.”

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