Economic Pessimism and the 2022 Election: A Postmortem

Abstract

The prospective model of voting behavior has its genesis in the forecasting errors made in 1994. Virtually every political scientist that made a forecast was off by a good bit. One political scientist made a bet concerning the accuracy of his forecast of the Republicans only picking up in the low single digits. The actual outcome was a fifty-four-seat pickup by the Republicans. The political scientist (who shall remain nameless here) who made the single-digit forecast lost a modest sum of money. Like many articles, this project started by thinking that the others in the enterprise had made some mistakes. Many of the models make use of economic conditions when attempting to forecast election outcomes. The voting behavior literature is replete with retrospective and prospective economic models of voting behavior. Unfortunately, political forecasting with economic data necessitates parsimony because we have few cases. Consequently, the model employed here follows the literature focusing on economic expectations. Specifically, the Survey of Consumer Attitudes and Behavior has an item that asks respondents to evaluate whether they will be better off or worse off in the