The forecaster that correctly predicted Trump's win over Harris more than a year ago

Predicting election results is hard. Really hard.

Even the famous Nate Silver said it was a 50/50 toss-up between Trump & Harris - as illustrated in the below screenshot of his final pre-election update.

But some people called it correctly, and did so a long time ago...

Back in April 2023, Ben Warner modelled Trump's chances against Biden compared to Kamala Harris or AOC - and predicted that Trump would beat the VP by 311 electoral college votes to 227.

Dominic Cummings used Ben's analysis in this blog post, illustrated in the below screenshot:

Now, while the exact result will take a few more days to finalise, the NYT is forecasting that Trump will secure 312 electoral votes, with 226 going to Harris.

That's just one vote off from a prediction made 18 months ago when Biden was still President!

Dumb luck? It’s possible.

But this is the same data scientist who correctly predicted the narrow win for Vote Leave in 2016.

And who also predicted that the Conservatives would win 364 seats in the 2019 election (they won 365!).

Of course, there are lots of factors that went into the various models that successfully called these outcomes - e.g. one of the things he focused on for Trump vs Harris was the "nonresponse bias" problem with non-college whites, which pollsters have struggled with in the last 3x presidential races.

But the real issue is that there are a bunch of systematic problems with the market research tools available today:

- People behave differently in focus groups compared to real life.

- Voters lie about who they are going to vote for.

- A poll is just a snapshot of a single moment of time, not a prediction of a future outcome.

- The list goes on...

That's why Ben and his business partner Alex Cooper are building the next generation of tools to help understand and model human behaviour with his company Electric Twin.

Because when you can predict the future, you can shape it.

I've had the pleasure of working with Ben during the 2019 election and during the COVID-19 pandemic, and he's the smartest guy in this game.

I've also been lucky enough to have a peek behind the curtain at what they're building, and it's a game changer for anyone that is interested in understanding and influencing human behaviour.

Definitely worth keeping an eye on Electric Twin...