The out-of-cycle, surprising German federal election of 2025 has ended. I call this the untethered election because my model, which mixes a prediction based on fundamentals with a polling average, saw big differences between the two. These differences were much bigger than in past election cycles (I wrote a whole post about why I think that might be the case).…
Category: Model
Germany is (probably) heading towards another grand coalition
I know this is not the most confident headline from a forecaster but I’m trying to be a bit more cautious than in 2021. I wrote some pretty bad takes in the last election cycle. I said for example that the SPD was doomed and the CDU/CSU was a strong favorite to win the election, neither of these came to…
The 2025 edition of the Vorcast model
If there’s one thing I was not in the mood for after the US election in November 2024, it was another high-stakes election – but here we are. The unpopular German “Traffic Light” coalition collapsed and a new federal election is expected to take place on February 23, 2025, seven months before the regularly scheduled election was to take place.…
The wild (by German standards) election of 2021
It’s always funny to me how quickly an election becomes a distant memory. The clarity that follows election results makes all the pontification, prophesying, and predicting beforehand seem immediately ancient. The big takeaway from the 2021 election is that the polls were quite good. They were also extremely sensitive — both over and under emphasizing shifts in the electorate. Additionally,…
Welcome to Vorcast
Welcome to Vorcast, my answer to the gap in Germany’s media landscape when it comes to data journalism. In this first post, I’ll introduce the blog, why I created it, and what you’ll find here. A lot of the points I bring up will end up being their own individual posts in the future — but I’ll keep things brief…