Identifying A Common False Positive: US Election 2024

The 2024 presidential election is now less than a year away. As the election nears, the media buzz will only grow louder. There is a lot of data, punditry, and bantering right now. Much of it is based on false assumptions.

But don’t believe everything you hear. Keeping up with elections is tricky and people’s own biases often color how they read the tea leaves.

Below are five charts that unpack some commonly held false beliefs about American elections. Note them and become a better student of the election game.

1. Validity date. Earlier this year, Democrats were sent into a frenzy over a string of polls that showed Biden trailing Trump in a theoretical 2024 election. But that panic may have been misplaced. Polls this far out have a notoriously bad record of actually predicting the election. Polls are a good way of checking where the population is now. A year from now? Forget about it.
2. Don’t look to midterms for presidential predictions. Do midterm elections predict the subsequent presidential election? The simple answer: not really. When you look at the past few decades, there isn’t a strong correlation between which party wins the election and which party wins the executive office. This is just noise not worth its weight in gold. Republicans won back the House in 2022; Democrats won the Senate. It doesn’t mean much.
3. Off-cycle elections are no crystal ball either. Again, the simple answer to whether off-cycle elections predict the subsequent presidential election is no. The outcome of all the gubernatorial, Senate, and House elections in an off-cycle election have a similarly low correlation to what ends up happening in the next general election. Another piece of noise. Yes, Democrats did well this year. But it doesn’t mean much.
4. Confused motives. In elections, the economy can be everything. But what happens when perceptions about the economy don’t match up with reality? That looks to be what’s happening now – a third of Americans think the U.S. is in a recession, even though it’s not (possibly due to the nagging inflation over the past few years). This puts a lot of Biden’s numbers dilemma into perspective.
5. Mixed signals. The economy and politics are inseparable. Consider what happened in 2020 right after Biden was elected to office: Democrats’ consumer confidence skyrocketed, Republicans’ consumer confidence plummeted. Politics is all about the economy; the economy is all about politics. Ultimately, are consumer confidence indicators leading or lapping indicators of politics? The is a hard one to answer these days. Be wary of overly simplistic economic arguments.

Covering elections is tricky business. Predicting them can be a fool’s errand if the analysts don’t wade carefully. Especially this far out, nobody can decisively “predict” how an election will turn out; we can only take a snapshot of the now.

As an educated election watcher, beware of false positives.