It’s a little early for Thanksgiving and Christmas season pies, but realclearpolitics.com’s Sean Trende gleefully makes mincemeat for us—of political scientists’ formulas for predicting who will win presidential elections. As he points out, you could also have predicted 15 of the last 16 election results by observing whether the Washington Redskins won or lost their last home game before the election (if the Redskins win, so does the incumbent party). It brings to mind the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s observation that there is a lower correlation between student test scores and amount of spending on education than between student test scores and the state capital’s distance from the Canadian border (policy implication: move your capital north). Read and enjoy.
