Sabato Predicts Very Close Obama/Romney Election

One of the nation’s most respected — and accurate — election prognosticators, Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball website, concludes that the only prediction appearing “very safe” right now is that the November presidential election is going to be very close.

Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, this week published an analysis by Emory University professor and Crystal Ball senior columnist Alan Abramowitz, using his “Time for Change” forecasting model.

Abramowitz “has tweaked his model to reflect the nation’s polarized electorate,” Sabato states. “The changes to the model, and its conclusions, provide more evidence that at this point the presidential election’s outcome is very much in doubt.”

According to Abramowitz, the outcome “will depend on which party does a better job of mobilizing its supporters and appealing to a small group of swing voters in a handful of battleground states.”

His basic Time for Change model takes into account three factors: the incumbent president’s approval rating in the final Gallup Poll in June; the change in real GDP in the second quarter of the election year; and a first-term incumbency advantage.

“The basic model does an excellent job of predicting the outcomes of presidential elections,” according to Abramowitz. “It has correctly predicted the winner of the popular vote in the last five presidential elections with an average error of about two percentage points.”

This year, however, Abramowitz has added an additional factor, the polarization effect, due to a decrease in the willingness of voters to cross party lines to vote for any candidate from the opposing party, including an incumbent.

This factor cuts the president’s incumbency advantage by slightly more than half, from 5.2 percentage points to about 2.5 points.

President Barack Obama’s approval rating in the final Gallup Poll in June was plus-2 points, 48 percent approval to 46 percent disapproval.

As for the change in real GDP in the second quarter, the number will be released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis on July 27. In Abramowitz’s model, a change of minus-3 percentage points would lead to a prediction that Obama will receive 47.7 percent of the popular vote, while a plus-3 change would lead to a 51.5 percent tally.

“A growth rate of zero or less predicts a narrow popular vote win for Republican challenger Mitt Romney, while a growth rate of 1 percent or greater predicts a popular vote win for President Obama,” Abramowitz discloses.

He adds that the outcome could come down to one or two closely contested battleground states. “And the next Florida might not be Florida — it might be Colorado, Ohio or Virginia.

“Based on the results of the revised Time for Change forecasting model, there is only one prediction that seems very safe right now — it’s going to be a long election night.”