Advance ticket sales have ended but plenty of additional tickets remain available at the door.
Profs and Pints DC presents: “Predicting Election Results,” a look at the tools of political prognostication and what they tell us about what will happen in November, with Matthew Green, professor and chair of the Department of Politics at Catholic University.
With the approach of any major election comes the emergence of pollsters, pundits and, yes, even professors who claim to know how the voting will go. Few of them explain how they reached their conclusions, even if they conflict with the predictions of others.
Profs and Pints is bringing you a talk to help you see through the spin, wishful thinking, and wild guesses about the 2022 midterm elections.
Professor Matthew Green, a scholar of congressional and electoral politics, will pull back the curtain to show you the tools that political scientists and professional prognosticators use in forecasting election outcomes. He will discuss some of the common misconceptions about what influences the vote, and he will review the strengths and weaknesses of various predictive models and the assumptions that lie behind each of them.
Professor Green will explain why so many models have forecasted a good year for Republicans in spite of short-term developments that seem to favor Democratic candidates. At the same time, some key factors in this election, such as newly drawn congressional districts and the nomination of unorthodox GOP candidates, have made these models' predictions more uncertain than usual.
Come learn about the art and science of forecasting election outcomes and how to be a better consumer of election-year predictions. (Advance tickets: $12. Doors: $15, or $13 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later. Please allow yourself time to place any orders and get seated and settled in.)
Image: Elephant and donkey icons by DonkeyHotey / Creative Commons.