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A Political History Forecast of the 2024 US Congressional Elections

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 October 2024

Michael S. Lewis-Beck  and
Stephen Quinlan Open the ORCID record for Stephen Quinlan [Opens in a new window]
Michael S. Lewis-Beck
Affiliation:
University of Iowa, USA
Stephen Quinlan
Affiliation:
GESIS–Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Germany
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Abstract

Statesman and scholar Alexis de Tocqueville (1876) once noted, “History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.” In other words, history has a habit of repeating itself, and we can deduce cycles and patterns that likely will recur. Such stability and inertia should bode well for prediction. Nevertheless, when it comes to election forecasting, especially in the United States, most prognostications rely on short-term political fundamentals measuring macroeconomic performance or government or leader popularity. In this contribution, we adopt a structural approach but depart from existing literature by focusing on historical party and governance dynamics in the vein of de Tocqueville to establish whether they offer solid guidance regarding the performance of Democrats in US congressional elections. Our ex-post political history models provide solid predictions of which party will control Congress and the Democrats’ seat tally in each chamber between 1946 and 2022. This creates conditions to assume that political history may help us forecast Campaign 2024. Our study applied this political history model to predict the 2024 congressional elections. It forecast Democrats to lose control of the Senate with a net loss of three seats and estimated an exceptionally close race for House control, with the point estimate for the House suggesting that the Democrats would fall short of winning control.

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Type
Article
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 58 , Issue 2: Forecasting the 2024 US Election , April 2025 , pp. 274 - 279
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Political Science Association

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