America's Next Top (Statistical) Model - 2020

US presidential elections come but once every 4 years, and this one's a big one. There are lots of people trying to predict what will happen. Can you top them? #civic

advanced practice
dec 2020
77 joined

candidates

Resources for Presidential Election Forecasting

There are many, many, many people and organizations that are interested in creating forecasts for US Presidential elections. Given the interest, there is a wide variety of data and models available to predict the outcome of the election.

For the most part, election models rely on two primary data sources: polls and fundamentals. Polls are when a sample of the population is called on the phone or asked on the internet who they would vote for. These polls are conducted by polling organizations and the results are published. Fundamentals are information about the population of a state: e.g., demographic information, income, spending, the stock market. By combining the results of many different polls and fundamentals, models are used to come up with election forecasts.

Your goal is to use whatever data sources you want to predict exact vote share percentages for each candidate, for each state in the US.


Background information


Existing predictions


Other possibly useful data sources


Ideas for other datasets

  • Social media posts, interest levels, and engagement
  • News media mentions, articles, and sentiment
  • Campaign contributions and spending