PoliSci class predicts Tues. election outcome
Michael Lyons’ Political Science 3000 class is only taught during election years, with the course project being to predict the outcome of the elections. But predicting elections is more of an involved process than meets the eye.
According to the class project description, after being assigned one of the 30 national races considered by experts to be the most competitive, each student must research demographic, economical and cultural data, write a biographical sketch of each candidate, outline each candidate’s financial position, analyze the position of each candidate on key issues, analyze campaign strategies and interpret public opinion surveys. Students watch campaign television ads, gather bumper stickers, listen to debates and read newspapers.
Lyons said, “In this election, almost everything you can imagine is available online. You can read newspaper stories that are very extensive, you can download TV commercials, you can get a pretty good sense of what’s going on in Kentucky or Indiana or Ohio.”
“It is a lot of work, but it familiarizes them with a very broad range of basic research materials,” Lyons said. “This is very comparable to the kind of research that many of them will be doing later on in their careers.”
The final step of the project is to predict the outcome of the election they’re researching.
Megan Sonderegger, a junior majoring in political science and journalism, researched the Senate race in Missouri. She predicts that Democrat Claire McCaskill will win against Republican incumbent Jim Talent. Her race is especially close, as the public opinion polls in Missouri have changed eight times in the last two weeks. But Sonderegger predicts McCaskill will win based on her support of stem cell research and her ties to the local communities. While it wasn’t part of the assignment, Sonderegger thinks Democrats will take both the House and the Senate on the national scale, and that this could affect the next presidential campaign. “But President Bush will affect the next presidential campaign more than anything else,” she said.
Keith Maynard, a senior in political science and technical writing, researched the Second Congressional District of Connecticut. He predicted Republican incumbent Rob Simmons would keep his seat against Democrat Joe Courtney because Simmons hasn’t always voted right in line with President Bush and people seem pretty satisfied with him.
Stephen Oliphant, a senior in political science, researched Colorado’s Seventh Congressional district. Oliphant predicts Democratic candidate Ed Perlmutter will win against Republican Rick O’Donell because “the country hates Republicans right now” and because the district, only three terms old, is “kind of a bluer district.”
“It’s a very, very competitive year. Republicans, of course, currently control both houses of Congress, but it’s a bad year to be a Republican because the Iraq war is so unpopular, because President Bush is unpopular and there have been a number of scandals,” Lyons said. “It now appears likely the Democrats will capture at least one house of Congress, but there’s genuine uncertainty, no one really knows.”
The students finished presenting their preliminary predictions on Friday and they’ll be presenting their final predictions today after a chance to revise their predictions over the weekend. After the final presentations, all of the predictions will be combined into a prediction for the entire House and Senate.
So far, Lyons’ class predicts that the Republicans will hold onto the Senate with 51 seats, while the Democrats will capture the House with about 224-226 seats.
“If the Democrats capture the House, it is going to change government,” Lyons said. “It’s going to force President Bush either to abandon everything he’s been trying to do, or to deal with the Democrats, somehow. A very likely result of this election will be an almost complete stalemate in government for the next two years, while everybody hopes that in the next election we’ll get a president who can somehow figure out a way to get us out of Iraq.”