Preference and Electoral Expectation

While cranking data for an upcoming presentation, mentioned in an earlier post, I thought I'd share a little data.  Looking at all U.S. presidential elections from 1952 to 2012, respondents were asked each election year who they were going to vote for, and who they thought would win.

• Among those who said they would vote for the Democratic candidate, 74.5 percent predicted the Democrat would win.

• Among those who said they would vote for the Republican candidate, 78.4 percent predicted the Republican would win.

The lesson here, obviously, is that people expect their own candidate will win the election. Another way to look at this is to collapse all those who predicted their own candidate would be victorious. See the graph below. The percent of folks who think their own candidate will win is inching up since 1996, but overall it's rarely dipped below 70 percent.