Following the November 2010 midterms, in which the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives and reduced the Democratic majority in the Senate, we asked a number of scholars to assess the first two years of the Obama presidency and look forward to the second half of his first term.
In the 2007-2008 academic year, I taught a seminar course on the presidential selection process that was subtitled, "Why Senators Don't Win the Presidency." I started the course by pointing out that since John F. Kennedy's victory in 1960 more than 40 sitting U.S. Senators had launched credible campaigns for the presidency without even one succeeding. Admittedly the success rate for presidential candidates is necessarily low, but surely such a 48-year run of futility marked some handicap that Senators suffered in the presidential contest. To understand this consistent track record of failure, we then studied the modern nomination process
Forget the polls. Forget the pundits. Forget the results of the 2010 midterm elections. Barack Obama is nearly certain to win reelection in 2012.
This positive outlook for the president is the verdict of The Keys to the White House, a historically based system for forecasting the results of American presidential elections. I first developed the Keys system in 1981, in collaboration with mathematician and geophysicist Vladimir Keilis-Borok. Retrospectively, the keys model accounts for every American presidential election since 1860. Prospectively, the keys have correctly forecast the popular vote winner of all seven presidential elections from 1984 to 2008,
Following the November 2010 midterms, in which the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives and reduced the Democratic majority in the Senate, we asked a number of scholars to assess the first two years of the Obama presidency and look forward to the second half of his first term.
