On Oct. 16, Middlebury Professor of Political Science Matt Dickinson gave a talk in the Franklin Environmental Center at Hillcrest analyzing the factors that influence the 2024 presidential election and offering his predictions on its outcome as part of the Carol Rifelj Lecture Series. Dickinson has published several books and articles about the presidency and provided election forecasts for several previous elections; he accurately predicted Biden’s victory in 2020.
His prediction this time around? It’s too close to call.
“The predicted popular vote margin and the predicted electoral vote margin of 24 votes are smaller than the standard errors. That means that the race is essentially too close to call,” Dickinson said in the talk.
The model that Dickinson used to formulate his prediction points to a razor-thin lead for Vice President Harris, who he predicted will win the popular vote by 2.6% and the presidency with 281 electoral votes. Regardless, this result is within the margin of error.
Dickinson relies on historical models made by other scholars across the country to arrive at his conclusion. Each model focuses on what Dickinson calls the fundamentals of the race.
“Fundamentals are basic indicators of how the world is going. So macroeconomic conditions — is disposable income expanding or decreasing? Are we at war or at peace? Meaning that fundamentals are the set of factors — many outside of the control of the president — that shape an election,” Dickinson said.
For example, the growth rate of disposable income at the beginning of an election year is historically correlated with an incumbent party’s vote share in that election. Fundamentals-based models look at the race from an objective, bird’s eye view and are quite distinct from poll-based models, like those run by Decision Desk HQ (DDHQ), The Economist and 538, according to Dickinson.
“The most important difference … [is that] those poll-based forecasts can’t tell why an election turns out the way it did,” Dickinson said.
The fundamentals that have the most predictive power are often in place well before Election Day.
“The fundamentals generally are in place by Labor Day, so most of our predictions are made in August or September, and we just kind of go hibernate for the cold months, and then we wake up on Nov. 5 and get the pats on the back for accurately predicting the election,” Dickinson said.
But what role is left to campaigns if the race can be predicted over the summer?
“Campaigns are crucial for making this model work, because what campaigns do is they enlighten voters about the fundamentals,” Dickinson explained in the talk, drawing from the work of political scientist Lynn Vavreck, who posits that the incumbents favored by fundamentals will run a “clarifying campaign.”
“[A clarifying campaign] is a campaign that's premised on the economy, talking about if the economy is going to help me, or if I don’t think that's going to help me, I got to switch the narrative,” Dickinson said.
Switching the narrative away from the fundamentals means running an “insurgency campaign.” According to Dickinson, insurgency campaigns lean on issues such as abortion rights, the Jan. 6 United States Capitol attack, threats to democracy and immigration.
Yet Dickinson said that assigning these strategies to the current campaigns of former President Trump and Vice President Harris is not easy. What effect will the last-minute switch of President Biden for Vice President Harris have on voters? And with a former president running for a non-consecutive second term, it is difficult to determine if this race has an ‘incumbent’ or not.
As the campaigns stake out their closing arguments, their strategies have become clearer to Dickinson.
“Harris wants to make this about democracy, about abortion and about Trump as a threat to our system of government. Trump wants to make this about the economy and immigration,” Dickinson said.
Regardless of the result, Dickinson points to evidence of a sizable racial realignment in politics, with minority groups that have historically backed Democrats migrating in huge numbers toward supporting Republicans as something to pay attention to on election night.
“The Democratic Party, particularly white Democrats, have become increasingly liberal,” Dickinson said. “We are increasingly separated from where voters of color are — they are ideologically much more moderate.”
Democrats are gaining with college-educated voters, making them a key part of Harris’s coalition.
“The key question that will determine the outcome of this election is, can Harris run up bigger margins for Democrats among college-educated [voters] compared to the widening margins for Trump among working-class voters?” Dickinson said.
A student in Dickinson’s current U.S Elections class, Aliya Hosford ’25, attended the lecture and found it eye-opening.
“I thought the lecture was really interesting… I enjoy his lecturing style and find it particularly engaging,” Hosford wrote in an email to The Campus.
She was also impressed by Dickinson’s ability to bring in multiple viewpoints.
“I also think that he raised some points that many people are not willing to talk about/don’t want to consider to be true,” she wrote.
The anticipated closeness of the race is noteworthy. Public polling aggregates show the seven swing states are within 2%, and the key states in the midwest have candidate leads of no more than 1%. While polling methods have been adjusted this year to increase accuracy, they are not able to predict down to tenths of percentage points and any systemic polling error could result in one candidate unpredictably sweeping the swing states. However, in both 2016 and 2020, polling underestimated Trump’s support by multiple points.
Like the fundamentals, current polling-based models have the race at a toss-up, nearly 50/50, which is unlikely to change in the final days of the race.
