His biographer, George Otto Trevelyan, noted that"(f)or ten years, from 1771 onwards, Charles Fox betted frequently, largely, and judiciously, on the social and political occurrences of the time.
It is no surprise, then, that election forecasting has become a big business, for polling firms, news organizations, and betting markets as well as academic students of politics.
The forecast models typically rely on a few predictors in highly aggregated form, with an emphasis on phenomena that change in the short-run, such as the state of the economy, so as to offer maximum leverage for predicting the result of a specific election.
[4] Election forecasting in the United States was first brought to the attention of the wider public by Nate Silver and his FiveThirtyEight website in 2008.
Most models include at least one public opinion variable, a trial heat poll, or a presidential approval rating.
Each poll can be weighted based on its age and its size, providing a highly dynamic forecasting mechanism as Election day approaches.
[7] When discussing the likelihood of a particular electoral outcome, political forecasters tend to use one of a small range of shorthand phrases.
[8][9][10] These include: Forecasting can involve skin-in-the-game crowdsourcing via prediction markets on the theory that people more honestly evaluate and express their true perception with money at stake.
One notable example is the expected utility model developed by American political scientist Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, which solves for the Bayesian Perfect Equilibria outcome of unidimensional policy events, with numerous applications including international conflict and diplomacy.