How to forecast an American’s vote
Unlock unlimited access to all our award-winning journalism, subscriber-only podcasts and newsletters Subscribe to The Economist Unlock unlimited access to all our award-winning journalism, subscriber-only podcasts and newsletters Your browser does not support the <audio> element. A merica’s founding fathers envisioned a republic in which free-thinking voters would carefully consider the proposals of office-seekers. Today, however, demography seems to govern voters’ choices. Since April 2017 The Economist and YouGov, a pollster, have surveyed 1,500 Americans each week. We have built a statistical model to estimate the odds of how each respondent will vote in next week’s mid-term elections. Polling of voting sub-groups can be misleading. City-dwellers are usually liberal. Is that because of where they live, or because they tend to be better educated and are less likely to be white than countryfolk? Our model measures each variable in isolation. Even among people of the same race and sch