From UCLA Today:
UCLA political scientist and Associate Professor Lynn Vavreck and John Sides, associate professor of political science at George Washington University, are confident that they can predict the outcome of the November vote, based on their study of 60 years of post-World War II U.S. presidential elections and other huge datasets. Since December, they have been analyzing data from public opinion polling done by YouGov, a polling firm in Palo Alto conducting 43,000 interviews online from a representative sample of people nationwide from Jan. 1 to Nov. 6, election day. Vavreck and Sides have also tracked news and social media content as well as campaign advertising to apply their social science perspective.
Vavreck and Sides call this their "Moneyball" approach — basing their data-intensive analysis of the election on statistical patterns and models, facts and reams of data, like the hero in the baseball movie. ...
Obama is the likely winner. When we look back at the history of modern presidential elections over the last 60 years, we can tell you that the two most important factors that predict election outcomes are the state of the economy and party identification. And these fundamental considerations are not likely to change in a day or week. They are determined months before the election takes place.
