The PollyVote team has completed its first survey of elections experts to forecast the 2012 presidential election.  In the mid December-early January survey, 15 academics from a variety of colleges and universities predicted that President Obama will eke out a narrow victory over his Republican opponent. 

The trimmed mean forecast is that Obama will garner 50.7% of the major-party vote. The experts are far from certain of their prediction’s accuracy, however, as might be expected with 10 months to go before the election.  Nevertheless, most experts’ assessments of Obama’s chances are quite similar, with 12 of the 15 predicting an Obama victory.  Forecasts of the Obama vote range from a high of 52% to a low of 48%. 

This is the third presidential election campaign in which an expert panel has been formed by the PollyVote team to forecast the election outcome.  The first surveys, those in 2004, did not begin as early as the current survey, but those for 2008 did.  The second 2008 survey was conducted in December 2007 and early January 2008, resulting in a 47.7% mean forecast for incumbent Republican party candidate John McCain.  McCain in fact received 46.3% of the major-party vote, for a mean forecast error of 1.4% for the experts. 

As evident in the January 2008 column in the Figure below, for this long-term forecast the experts were more accurate than other competing methods during this period, which all incorrectly predicted larger shares of the vote for McCain.  Mean errors were 2.6% for campaign polls, 2.50% for the Iowa Electronic Market vote share contract, and 1.8% for Ray Fair’s econometric model (the only such model generating forecasts this early in the campaign).       

The PollyVote team plans to conduct surveys monthly until fall 2012, when the experts will be polled more frequently.