Shawn Tully
Updated Wed, September 18, 2024 at 3:11 p.m. CDT·8 min read
In late 2020 and early 2021, this reporter wrote several stories focusing on the election predictions advanced by Thomas Miller, a data scientist at Northwestern University. I was intrigued by the highly original methodology Miller deployed in calling the trends, and outcomes, first in the presidential race, then for the two Georgia senatorial contests, where the surprise twin victories gave Democrats control of the upper chamber.
Now, Miller is back in the arena for the first time since offering those highly unconventional forecasts. He's using a similar system to handicap the supposedly super-tight presidential election that will be decided just 48 days hence. His wildly out-of-the-mainstream call is sure to shock pollsters, pundits and Fortune's readers alike. But Miller's view merits close attention for two basic reasons: First, it's based on numbers-crunching that's arguably a lot more scientific than the voter surveys almost always cited to chart the contest's trajectory, and second, he achieved pinpoint accuracy four years ago.
In all three 2020 contests, Miller beat virtually every pollster, and modeler parsing multiple voter surveys. He missed the size of Biden's win in the electoral college by just 12 votes, tagging every state for the correct column save Georgia. For the two senate runoffs, Miller refined his approach to sorting data on the Peach State, and scored again. A week before Election Day on December 6, 2020, the polls gave Republican David Perdue a wide lead over Democrat Jon Ossoff, and showed the GOP's Kelly Loeffler in a dead heat versus opponent Raphael Warnock. By contrast, Miller's numbers had Loeffler heading for a big loss, and Ossoff en route to a modest victory. Once again, the contrarian academic nailed it: Miller was just 0.2% short on Warnock's 2.0% margin, and precisely on target in forecasting Ossoff's 1.0% final bulge at the ballot box.
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Flanders.