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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. ...Tap To Read The Full Story Here | ..Tap To Read The Full Story Here...
With days to go until the election, Newsweek can exclusively reveal the K-9’s pick among the two major party candidates.
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Joy was presented with a picture of both presidential candidates and two identical treats.
Dog Predicts Election
Joy making her selection. In a lighthearted twist on election predictions, a dog named Joy has emerged as the latest oracle for the 2024 U.S. presidential election. John Antonakis
In a test conducted by John Antonakis, Professor of Organizational Behavior at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, Joy selected Trump.
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Antonakis told Newsweek: “I said to my dog in French, “Mange”—eat! And she went for the Trump treat first.”
Antonakis described using animals to predict elections as “silly,” but that didn’t deter him from deploying his dog to sniff out the winner.
“Does that mean Trump will win? Perhaps! But we cannot know. What is the probability she would do that? One out of two, or a probability of 0.50. To see if animals or anyone can divine (to be clear, they cannot), we’d have to see them guessing repeatedly, and this is better than chance.
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“For instance, getting three guesses in a row correctly by chance alone would be 0.125. Getting 5 in a row would be a probability of 0.03125, about 3 out of 100.
“This result suggests that if you take 100 animals and ask them to guess 5 elections, about 3 would get it right. I generated a simulated dataset, and here is what I found.”
‘Be Wary of Punditry’
Antonakis said: “The moral of the story. Take a bunch of animals, and you’ll find one that has amazing divination skills. So too with pundits. Some will survive the test of time. Does Allan Lichtman, the election Nostradamus, have amazing diving skills? Perhaps he has had 9 out of 10 correct.
“If you ask 500 pundits to guess the result of the U.S. election correctly, about 1 will get it right, just by chance alone. So we should be wary of such punditry. What is more impressive is estimating the Electoral College outcome. How close do you get to the actual result over time? This closeness is the mean estimation error; a model that has a very low estimation error (e.g., is about 5 percentage points off or less) would be very impressive.
Antonakis and his colleague, Professor Philippe Jacquart from Emlyon Business School in France, have updated and expanded Professor Ray Fair’s econometric election model from Yale University by incorporating a measure of charisma to better predict the likely winner of the electoral college.
A retrospective analysis using this revised model accurately forecasts 25 out of the last 27 elections, achieving a success rate of 92.59 percent.
Their model identifies these three key factors that will influence the outcome: the state of the economy, incumbency, and charisma.
According to the model, an analysis of their acceptance speeches at the party conventions indicates that Harris possesses less charisma than Trump. Additionally, the incumbency advantage typically favors sitting presidents, who are more likely to win.
However, since there is technically no incumbent president in this election with President Joe Biden having dropped out, the other two factors influence the model to a greater extent.
Using this model, Trump appears to have the upper hand over Harris, according to Antonakis and Jacquart.
What Other Animals Have Predicted U.S. Elections?
In Joy’s case, the dog selected Trump; however, not all animals appear to agree.
A squirrel named Gnocchi Jr. was given two separate bowls labeled Harris and Trump.
The winner was determined by which bowl he ate the most nuts out of.
After more than 30 minutes of eating, Gnocchi decided Harris would take the keys to the White House in November.
Geda the Chinese monkey, who lives in Shiyanhu Ecological Tourism Park, successfully predicted that Trump would win the 2016 presidential election against Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
At a Siberian zoo, a brown bear and two tigers were given watermelons decorated with images of Donald Trump and Joe Biden as part of a playful attempt to predict the winner of the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
Khan, a white Bengal tiger, playfully rolled around with the watermelon featuring Biden’s image inside its enclosure, leaving Trump’s watermelon untouched.
Barken, an Amur tiger, paused briefly before siding with Khan, decisively smashing Biden’s watermelon, and Buyan, the brown bear, also picked the Biden watermelon.
