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 of politics at The Catholic University of America.
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 2024 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 near equal chance for either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris to be elected president, and the circumstances that may make these models' predictions more uncertain than usual. He will also discuss predictions of which party is likely to win control of the House and Senate.
Come learn about the art and science of forecasting election outcomes and how to be a better consumer of election-year predictions. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)
Image: Elephant and donkey icons by DonkeyHotey / Creative Commons.