Web Extra!
While many people anxiously await the election result tonight, a political science professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago says he thinks Barack Obama is heading to the White House.
Robert Bruhl’s crystal ball for voting outcomes is based on a formula he developed using the unemployment rate.
“The economic indicator that most people see or feel is unemployment,” Bruhl said. “People don’t really pay attention to the interest rate, the money supply doesn’t affect them …but they do know about unemployment …they know when the job market starts to get tight … they know when their neighbor doesn’t have a job.”
In 2003, Bruhl was investigating whether the economic behavior of a president’s term influenced results of a coming election.
Bruhl said at first he could not find any statistical relationships between economic factors and election results. After focusing on short-term economic situations, however, he found the unemployment rate at the time of the election strongly influenced how many votes the incumbent party would receive. If the unemployment increases are high, Bruhl said, voters tend to “punish” the party in office.
Because of the close relationship he found between the election results and the unemployment rate, Bruhl decided to use the unemployment rate as his only factor in the model.
Bruhl said by looking at past elections, he was able to test his model and predict if it would work.
“You apply [a statistical model] to the conditions of the time and see if your model predicts what actually happens,” Bruhl said. “You go backwards.”
So far, Bruhl’s model has proved to be right 15 out of 18 times. Tonight, Bruhl is shooting for 16 out of 19.