Att förutsäga amerikanska presidentval

Abstract

During the last decades, we have seen an increased public interest in efforts to forecast US presidential elections. A leading actor in this development is Nate Silver, founder of the news site FiveThirtyEight. We provide a brief overview of the historical development of forecasting methods, including both opinion polling and structural models, and the combination of the two that has been developed by Silver and others. We also discuss the 2016 election, where Donald Trump stood as the winner, while all forecasts had been leaning towards Hillary Clinton. This gave rise to an intense debate about both the substance of these forecasts and how they are presented. We conclude with a discussion of the development of forecasts of the 2020 election.