Remember When This Crank is Rolled Out in 2028
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
I’m recalling the group of quantitative political scientists who had developed a model to forecast Presidential elections. They were in 2000 predicting Albert Gore would win 60% of the vote. Their model was, er, mis-specified.
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(Four presidents have been elected de novo with those sorts of margins. Two were men of accomplishment admired from one end of the political spectrum to another (H. Hoover in 1928, Eisenhower in 1952), one was running against the incumbent in the midst of an economic catastrophe (F. Roosevelt in 1932), and one was another challenger running during a severe business recession contra the party of a discredited incumbent hiding from everyone but his doctor and his wife (Harding in 1920). In evaluating their model, they might have asked themselves if the situation resembled any of the foregoing.