While some election pundits use traditional measures like polling to predict the next presidential race winner, not all indicators are equal. And in some cases, unconventional indicators yield interesting results.
Here are five things you can track before and during Election Day to see if you can get a jump on determining our next President!
Watch Florida, Nevada and Ohio
The candidate winning those states had won the past five elections. Overall, Ohio has called the presidential winner correctly since 1964. (In 1960, Ohio went for Nixon instead of Kennedy.)
Florida has voted for the winner in nine of the past 10 elections (it missed with Bush instead of Clinton in 1992). Nevada has picked the winner in the past nine elections. It was last wrong in 1976, when it went for Ford instead of Carter. Iowa and New Mexico have also predicted eight of the past 10 presidential elections correctly.
Boy Scouts as President
Yes, the past six elections have been won by candidates who were Boy Scouts: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. But Mitt Romney and John Kerry were also former Boy Scouts who lost in their presidential bids.
It’s unclear from media reports if Donald Trump was a Boy Scout. Trump was educated at a military academy as a teenager. Hillary Clinton was a Girl Scout.
The other Presidents who were Boy Scouts: Gerald Ford and John F. Kennedy.
The Redskins Factor
The Redskins rule is known inside the Beltway and has held true in 17 of 19 cases, in the electoral vote.
Quite simply, if the Washington Redskins win their last home game before the election, the incumbent party will win the presidential election. Only the Obama-Romney election of 2012 and the Kerry-Bush election of 2004 broke the precedent.
The good news for the Democrats is that Washington beat the Philadelphia Eagles 27-20 in their last home game before this year’s election. The bad news the trend didn’t help Mitt Romney at all in 2012, so the Redskins rule has lost a bit of its luster.
Halloween masks for candidates
In past years, the most popular Halloween masks for candidates have been solid indicators of who will win the election.
The past five winners in the Halloween masks sweepstakes were Bill Clinton (1996), George W. Bush (2004 and 2008), and Barack Obama (2008 and 2012). The worst selling masks were for Bob Dole and John Kerry.
As of late September, Trump led Clinton by a 10 point margin, 55 percent to 45 percent, in a costume survey conducted by a Halloween costume company and the Harris Research Group.
The Unemployment Rate
It may seem boring and traditional, but economic indicators also are pointed to as possible indicators of election outcomes.
In October 2016, economist Danielle Marceau wrote in Forbes that the direction of the unemployment rate at election time has predicted the presidential winner since 1972, with the exception of the Bush-Gore election of 2000 (where Gore took the popular vote but not the Electoral College).
As of this week, the national unemployment rate was at 5 percent and it has fallen steadily since late 2010. That would indicate that the incumbent party will retain the White House, based on Marceau’s observation.
