Silly Predictors: Election 2024 Predictions from Absurd Sources

This is an absolutely unserious post. Go elsewhere if you want real analysis.

For real analysis, I recommend Baby Rubin.

Back in 2016, I did a series of posts digging up silly attempts at diving the results of the 2016 Presidential election:

• 26 October 2016: Prep for Pointing and Laughing: Some Pre-Election Polling  (these were the serious predictions)

• 4 November 2016: More Predictions for Maximum Hilarity  (these were the silly predictions)

• 9 November 2016: Election Prediction Aftermath: The Goat LOSES  (after the election, I found some other silly predictors)

There was a monkey, a psychic goat, a professor who foolishly had to eat bugs due to his overconfident prediction, and on and on.

(Yes, I’m skipping over 2020. Let’s forget that ever happened.)

Let’s see what idiocy is on offer this year!

Animals predict the winner

Dog goes for Trump

Newsweek: Dog Predicts 2024 Presidential Election, Sniffs Out Donald Trump as Winner

In a lighthearted twist on election predictions, a dog named Joy has emerged as the latest oracle for the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

Vice President Kamala Harris of the Democratic Party is engaged in a razor-thin race with her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump.

With days to go until the election, Newsweek can exclusively reveal the K-9's pick among the two major party candidates.

Joy was presented with a picture of both presidential candidates and two identical treats.

In a test conducted by John Antonakis, Professor of Organizational Behavior at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, Joy selected Trump.

Moo Deng Goes for Trump

VIDEO: Celebrity baby hippo Moo Deng predicts Trump will win election based on which cake she eats

Celebrity baby hippo Moo Deng has predicted a win for Donald Trump in tomorrow’s U.S. election.

The cute hippo picked a watermelon carved with Trump’s name (in the local language) over another with Kamala Harris’s name.

This video was filmed on Monday, November 4, at the Khao Kheow Open Zoo in Chonburi, eastern Thailand, according to reports.

Monkeys say it’s a toss-up

The Conversation: Monkeys know who will win the election – primal instincts humans share with them shape voters’ choices

In the study, which is under review at the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, we showed monkeys pairs of candidate photos from U.S. gubernatorial and senatorial elections, and they correctly predicted the outcomes based solely on visual features.

Specifically, the monkeys spent more time looking at the loser than the winner. This “gaze bias” predicted not only the election outcomes but also the candidates’ vote share. Monkeys tended to look at the candidates with more masculine facial features – and these were the candidates more likely to win in the real elections. Jaw prominence had a direct relationship with vote share.

Previous research helps explain the monkeys’ gaze bias. When monkeys were shown pictures of unfamiliar but powerful male monkeys, they would only glance briefly at them, presumably because monkeys interpret staring as a sign of aggression. But their gaze lingered when shown a low-status male monkey or a female.

Those preferences were on full display when we showed the macaques photos from the most recent races involving Donald Trump. Their gaze bias, driven by primitive instincts, indicated the winners. The monkeys looked the longest at the Democratic opponent in the contest between Trump and Hillary Clinton. There was less of a gaze bias in the matchup with Joe Biden. And the monkeys looked for about the same amount of time at Trump as at Harris. That means among the three most recent Democratic candidates, based solely on visual features, the monkeys predicted Harris stands the best chance of winning against Trump.

Note that the study says that the monkeys look at the loser the longest.

I think it’s bullshit, not that anybody asked me.

Strange Methods to Predict

I like to look at older strange methods to predict elections, so here’s a piece from the last time around, from October 2020. So let me touch on a few, talk about how they turned out in 2020, and what they say this time.

Wacky Ways to Make Presidential Election Predictions

Washington Football Team Rule

If the Washington Football team win their last home game before the election, the incumbent party will stay in power. The only time this unconventional election prediction has been incorrect was in 2004 when both Washington and John Kerry lost. In 2016, Washington and the Bengals tied 27-27. In 2020 the Washington Football Team beat the Dallas Cowboys 25-3 on October 25.

Presidential Election Prediction 2020: Trump  2016: Tie

This rule is a bust.

It sucked in 2020, and didn’t do much in 2016.

For what it’s worth, the Washington Commanders (“Washington Football team” BAH) won their last home game, which was on October 20, 2024, against the Carolina Panthers. The score was 40-2. That’s pretty definitive.

According to the rule, the Democrats are supposed to stay in power. But this rule didn’t work in 2020, and was inconclusive in 2016.

Newsweek: The Strange Way the Washington Commanders May Predict the Election

Multiple Items Without Result

So I went through the list, and I noticed many/most of these were no longer available/done:

• 7-Eleven Cups

• First Lady Bake-Off (wasn’t done in 2020…and does anybody want to eat Doug Emhoff’s cookies?)

• Halloween Masks — well, there was some news around this, but it was ugly and I’m not linking it

• Scholastic Poll

• Geda, the mystic monkey

Some were stopped in 2020, for obvious reasons.

Who’s Taller?

They say that the country hasn’t elected a bald president since Dwight D. Eisenhower due to the advent of TV and media. But what about short presidents? This next predictor isn’t based on a candidate’s hair, although certain hairstyles may well help them in this category. A 2011 study by a Texas Tech political science professor found that people prefer taller leaders. It also found taller people think of themselves as more qualified to be leaders and are also more likely to pursue leadership positions. 

Trump, at about 6’2”-6’3” is taller than Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris. The only one close to his height is Biden, at about 6’. Trump lost to Biden.

The Oscars Method: How Did the Most Recent “Best Picture” Winner End? 

For the movie buffs out there, this next predictor might be your favorite! If the movie ends on a sad note, then the White House will change hands. The 2020 best picture winner was Parasite and in 2016 it was Spotlight. Without giving away the endings, we’ll just say that based on this predictor.

Presidential Election Prediction 2020: Biden 2016: Unclear 

Well, that worked for 2020, I suppose.

What won this year? Was it a movie anybody even heard of?

Oh, Oppenheimer.

Yeah, that wasn’t a happy ending.

So, this would say Trump wins.

More on the Oscars rule - from 2016: Politico: Clinton or Trump? Here’s What 7 Weird Prediction Methods Say.

Four years ago, Jacopo della Quercia of Cracked realized that determining the winner of the presidential election is as simple as this: Did the movie that won Best Picture at the Oscars earlier that election year have a happy ending? If so, the incumbent party will also prevail. But if the movie ends on a sad note, then the White House will change hands.

The trend started in 1976, with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which ends with a mental hospital erroneously lobotomizing a sane person. Later that year, Jimmy Carter took the White House from Gerald Ford. Kramer vs. Kramer, the Best Picture winner in 1980, ended with a couple agreeing to divorce and the mother saying goodbye to her young son; that November, Ronald Reagan beat Carter. Silence of the Lambs, the winner in 1992, closed with the cannibalistic Hannibal Lecter planning to “have an old friend for dinner”; months later, Bill Clinton defeated George H.W. Bush. Other than the slightly questionable case of The Last Emperor, which won Best Picture in 1988, the pattern has had a perfect record up through the 2012 election.

What this means for 2016: At the end of Spotlight, the most recent Best Picture, the hard-charging journalists at the Boston Globe finally publish their exposé on pedophile priests in Boston. As the journalists arrive at the Globe’s headquarters shortly after the paper hits newsstands, the paper’s phone lines are flooded with calls from past abuse victims coming forward with their stories. On-screen intertitles relate the chilling news that Cardinal Law, implicated in the cover-up in Boston, was given a new perch in Rome. We learn that the Globe’s coverage exposed a massive system of corruption and inspired similar investigations around the world.

Does that qualify as a happy ending? Is that somber and sobering final note enough to cancel out the important work accomplished at the Globe? Is exposing suppressed tragedy a moment of joy or sorrow? The answer is subjective.

So I decided to look at the years they didn’t mention, when there wasn’t a turnover:

• 1984: Terms of Endearment — I mean, it kind of is a happy ending. We do all eventually die, so the death of one of the main characters does not make it a sad ending necessarily. You’ll see that for 1996, too.

• 1988: The Last Emperor — come on, this wasn’t happy

• 1992: Silence of the Lambs — that wasn’t a sad ending, exactly. It was kind of funny.

• 1996: Braveheart — I mean, I guess this is like Terms of Endearment. It’s supposed to be uplifting. Even though William Wallace is executed by the English, Robert the Bruce wins against the English after Wallace’s death.

• 2000: American Beauty

• 2004: LOTR: Return of the King - very happy

• 2008: No Country for Old Men - yikes

• 2012: The Artist - uh what? I don’t know this one - ok, looks like happy ending

• 2016: Spotlight

• 2020: Parasite

• 2024: Oppenheimer

Vulture: The ‘Troubling Reverberations’ at the End of Oppenheimer, Explained

So, I would say the funny/strange predictors are also as useless as the “respectable” polls this year.

But more fun to think about than pulling your hair out over small differences between polls with +/-3% confidence intervals.