Electoral College Prediction: Victory for Mitt Romney

Get this folks, the Huffington Post is reporting that two University of Colorado professors, have put together an Electoral College forecast model to predict the winner of the 2012 presidential election and the result are bad news for Barack Obama. The model predicts a victory for Mitt Romney.

The two political science professors, Ken Bickers from CU-Boulder and Michael Berry from CU-Denver, say that the model has correctly forecast every winner of the electoral race since 1980.

“Based on our forecasting model, it becomes clear that the president is in electoral trouble,” Bickers said in a press statement.

The model uses economic indicators from all 50 states and it shows 320 electoral votes for Romney and 218 for Obama, according to The Associated Press. The model also suggests that Romney will win every state currently considered a swing state which includes Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Colorado.

Berry cautions that just because the model has worked in the past, doesn’t mean it will work this time.

“As scholars and pundits well know, each election has unique elements that could lead one or more states to behave in ways in a particular election that the model is unable to correctly predict,” Berry said in a statement.

This kind of Electoral College model is the only only one of its kind to include more than one state-level measure of economic conditions — both national unemployment rates as well as per capita income, according to a press release about the study from University of Colorado. Research suggested that voters hold Democrats more responsible for unemployment rates while Republicans are held more responsible for per capita income.

“The apparent advantage of being a Democratic candidate and holding the White House disappears when the national unemployment rate hits 5.6 percent,” Berry said. To which Bickers added, “The incumbency advantage enjoyed by President Obama, though statistically significant, is not great enough to offset high rates of unemployment currently experienced in many of the states.”

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