All Times ET
Keywords: U.S. Presidential Election, Predictive Modeling, COVID-19
This project investigates the validation of a prediction model and the actual 2020 result of the 2020 United States Presidential Election. The prediction model consists of the predicted election result, which is derived from the z-scores of the number of infected cases, deaths, and unemployment increase rates for each of 15 “swing states” and the 2012-2016 election result average. The 15 “swing states” are found by calculating a swing index, which shows the amount of “swing” each state exhibited in the past two elections. The predicted election result is then subtracted in response to the media’s report about how Donald Trump is expected to lose 3-5% of his votes from the 2016 election. The model is used to compare the level of accuracy between the predicted 2020 election result and its subtracted values against the 2020 actual election result. The paired t-test and correlation test are used to test the significance between the 2020 actual result and 2020 predicted result as well as the 2016 actual result and 2020 actual result to see how the 2020 predicted result compares with the 2016 actual result in predicting the 2020 actual result. A 1-proportion hypothesis test is also used to compare the accuracy of the 2020 predicted result with the 2020 actual result. All calculations and analysis are done on the JMP statistical analysis platform.