Скачать или смотреть Cracking the Commanders Code: Can NFL Wins Predict the White House?

Who’s going to win the next election? You might think we'll want to start with the usual suspects: polls and approval ratings. But I say no, let's look at whether the Washington Commanders won their last home game.

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There's this interesting relationship you can observe beginning in 1936 and continuing all the way through the 2000 election. If Washington, D.C.'s football team wins their last home game before the election, the incumbent party wins the presidential election. If the team loses that home game, the incumbent party loses power. And this relationship help up for 17 straight presidential elections!

You would be forgiven for thinking that there must be some kind of causal relationship between these two variables. But this truly is just one of those weird coincidences, as we can see once we zoom out to a few more elections. You can actually start counting in 1932, but the rule didn't work that year. And if you check the elections since 2000, the rule has only worked once.

This is one of the things statisticians mean when they say correlation is not causation. Sometimes things are just coincidences, even if they happen to work 17 times in a row.

Now, apropos of this year's election, the Commanders won their last home game 18-15. What do you think that means for our election results?

#2024Election #forecasting #linearregressions

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