A scientific election model that has accurately predicted the victor in the last five presidential campaigns shows that 2012 could be a repeat of 2000, when Al Gore won the popular vote but George W. Bush took the electoral victory. And in that scenario, it’s President Obama who would likely be Gore.
The forecasting model developed by Emory University’s Alan Abramowitz for the Univeristy of Virginia’s Center for Politics “Crystal Ball” indicates that Obama should win with about 50.5 percent. But his only accounts for the popular vote and he warns that in a razor-tight election, the Electoral Vote count can go haywire.
According to Abramowitz’s new analysis provided to Secrets, “There is a very close relationship between the national popular vote and the electoral vote–the correlation between the two for the 16 elections since World War II is .97. The 2000 election is the only one since 1888 in which the winner of the popular vote did not also win the Electoral Vote. However, given the expected closeness of the popular vote in 2012, another Electoral College misfire has to be considered a possibility.”
And if that happens Virginia could be a key. “In the end, the outcome could come down to one or two closely contested battleground states. And the next Florida might not be Florida — it might be Colorado, Ohio or Virginia,” he said.
Called the “Time for Change” model, Abramowitz bases his calculation on the incumbent’s advantage, political polarization, the sitting president’s approval rating at the end of June and second quarter gross domestic product.
All of those factors are known except GDP, though the consensus is for 1.4 percent growth. For Obama to win, he told Secrets, GDP has to grow about 1 percent or better. The final GDP is announced on July 27.
