Pitfalls of Demographic Forecasts of US Elections

We thank our dedicated research assistants for their contributions to this project. For helpful comments we thank Isaiah Andrews, Oren Danieli, Tatyana Deryugina, Gemma Dipoppa, Ben Enke, Ray Fair, Jeremy Friedman, Andrew Gelman, Ed Glaeser, Kareem Haggag, Yueran Ma, Torsten Persson, Jim Snyder, and Alex Tabarrok, along with seminar audiences at the University of Chicago, MIT, the University of Toronto, the NBER (especially discussant Ro’ee Levy), NYU, the PRIN Workshop on the Economics of Culture, and Paris Sorbonne. Vincent Pons is the cofounder of a company in Europe, Explain. The paper includes the researchers’ own analyses based in part on data from the American National Election Studies. American National Election Studies and the relevant funding agency/agencies bear no responsibility for use of the data or for interpretations or inferences based upon such uses. This paper uses the Census Bureau Data API but is not endorsed or certified by the Census Bureau. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• October 1, 2024