Professional forecasters have wonderful jobs, don't they? Weather forecasters can be completely wrong about the weather and they still get to keep their jobs. Political pundits and pollsters can be absolutely wrong about the outcomes of elections and they will be back the next day with more polls and predictions. Nice work, right?
The 2016 US presidential election provided a lovely example of just how inaccurate pundits and pollsters can be. Most of them were expecting Hillary Clinton to become our first woman president. Heck, Hillary Clinton was probably expecting it, too. Hello President Trump. Man, were they wrong!
Martin Gottlieb knows quite a lot about political punditry. For many years he wrote editorials for the Dayton Daily News and he wrote columns about politics. Gottlieb became intrigued with the political predictions that were being made by Professor Allan Lichtman. Over the course of numerous elections Lichtman was able to forecast who would win presidential elections with astounding accuracy. Sometimes he was able to predict which party would be able to claim the White House in an upcoming election before the actual candidates had even been chosen.
In his book "Campaigns Don't Count" Gottlieb shows us the system that Lichtman has been using to make his predictions. This new revised edition takes readers up through our most recent presidential election, a contest in which even Professor Lichtman failed to accurately forecast the results.
The Book Nook on WYSO is made possible by five local library systems in southwest Ohio: the Greene County Public Library, Washington-Centerville Public Library, Clark County Public Library, Dayton Metro Library, and Wright Memorial Public Library.
