New high for Democrats in PollyVote expert survey

The Pollyvote team has completed its seventh survey of elections experts to forecast the 2016 presidential election. In the late June survey, conducted between June 28 and 30, 12 academics from a variety of colleges and universities responded.

All responding experts expected a Democratic win, with forecasts of the popular vote ranging from a minimum of 52.0% to a maximum of 57.0%. The mean forecast is that the Democrats will garner 54.2% of the major-party vote (compared to 45.8% for the Republicans).

The predicted Democratic vote share is thus 1.8 percentage points higher than in the previous survey, conducted in late May, when the mean expert experts had predicted a vote share of 52.4%. The current results also show the highest vote share for the Democrats in all expert surveys conducted since January.

Polly thanks the experts who participated in this round, namely

• Randall Adkins (University of Nebraska Omaha)
• Lonna Rae Atkeson (University of New Mexico)
• George Edwards (Texas A&M University)
• John Geer (Vanderbilt University)
• Sandy Maisel (Colby College)
• Michael Martinez (University of Florida)
• Thomas Patterson (Harvard University)
• Gerald Pomper (Rutgers University)
• Larry Sabato (University of Virginia)
• Michael Tesler (University of California, Irvine)
• Charles Walcott (Virginia Tech)

and one expert who preferred to remain anonymous.