After an election, vote results tell you who won, but they don't tell you about the people who voted in that election, what they thought of the candidates or the issues, what really mattered to them while they were casting their ballots. In other words, they don't tell you the why of the ele…

WASHINGTON — Before there was a FiveThirtyEight model, or a New York Times election night needle, or 13 keys revealing “how presidential elections really work,” there was an economist named Louis Bean.

Bean achieved a sort of political fame for a book he wrote in 1948 that suggested, contrary to conventional wisdom, that Democratic President Harry Truman was favored to win the election, not Republican Thomas Dewey, the governor of New York.

“It is here, presumably, where the experts fall out, that the tea leaves and intuition enter in,” said a Times review of Bean's book, “How to Predict Elections.”

Truman won.

When Bean predicted that Sen. Robert A. Taft, R-Ohio, would lose reelection in 1950, The Washington Post printed the headline: “Political Prophet Sees Taft Defeat.”

Today, there are more of these “prophets” than ever.

Minnesotans United for All Families, who opposed a gay marriage amendment, watch a video feed of a "What If?" scenario on the presidential race at an election night party Nov. 6, 2012, in St. Paul, Minn. 

It may be no surprise that people seek certainty before elections happen, given what they see as the stakes: One recent Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found that about 7 in 10 Americans believe that the future of democracy is at stake in this year’s presidential election, and another found that about 6 in 10 Americans described themselves as being “fearful” about the possibility of Democrat Kamala Harris winning, Republican Donald Trump winning, or both.

Yet often the forecasters themselves are the first to push back on the characterization that they can tell you what's going to happen.

“People, I think, are looking for oracles, right?” said Nate Silver, the founder of FiveThirtyEight and author of the Silver Bulletin, a new site analyzing elections. 

Charlie Cook, founder of the Cook Political Report, said he flinches “at the term ‘prediction’ because it suggests saying, ‘I think Smith will win.’” But, Cook said, ”In close races, how can someone say that without knowing precisely what will happen between now and the last vote is cast?"

Most people, Cook said, "don’t really understand probabilities, they want it to be definitive, either Smith or Jones, no hedging, no qualifying, no conditions, don’t give me nuance" and "they want us to say something that is unknowable.”

In a recent column, the Cook Report’s publisher and editor, Amy Walter, issued a “plea” to stop “attaching your hopes, dreams, and fears to one poll or a poll model on any given day.”

Even Bean, whose election predictions made headlines for decades, cautioned against reading his analysis as gospel. A year before the 1968 election, he predicted, with a caveat, that Democratic President Lyndon Johnson would defeat Republican Richard Nixon: “If the Republicans win, you ought to forget it and say it was a good, tentative early analysis.”

Johnson ended up dropping out and his vice president, Humbert Humphrey, was the party's nominee. Nixon won.

Nuanced analysis versus snappy headlines

Before the 2022 midterms, a Q-and-A with David Wasserman appeared in New York Magazine with the headline "'A Category 2 or 3 Hurricane Headed Democrats' Way.’” The quote wasn’t wrong. It just wasn’t complete.

“Today, we’re somewhere between an asterisk year, where there’s a minimal wave, and a classic midterm election, where Republicans do quite well," Wasserman said at the time. "I think this is probably a Category 2 or 3 hurricane headed Democrats’ way, just not a Category 4 or 5.”

Wasserman, senior editor and elections analyst at the Cook Report, said he was trying to convey that, despite the conventional wisdom, a massive Republican wave wasn’t imminent at all. But that's not how many readers interpreted the headline. Republicans ended up making only modest gains.

Before the internet took off, analysts such as Cook and Stu Rothenberg offered their analysis in newsletters. Part of that included putting individual races in categories, on a scale from “safe” to “toss-up.” Those designations come from a combination of access to polling data, reporting in battleground states, in-person assessments of candidates and other factors that have made Cook and Rothenberg some of the foremost elections experts.

Some statewide races will be so lopsided that The Associated Press will be able to declare a winner before any of the results are released. The AP takes into account everything it knows about an election. All of the research, all of the past election results, the trends that we've seen in that state, the money being spent in the race, the reporting on what's happening in that race. And then tops it off with something called VoteCast.

The ratings, however, are only a small part of the analysis these outlets provide.

Rothenberg, founder of the Rothenberg Political Report, approached his newsletter as a venue to tell subscribers what he had observed and analyzed in the world of elections, communicating directly with the readers who knew and trusted him.

Sometimes news outlets would mark his ratings as news events, rather than as expert analysis.

“It was like I was coming down from Mount Sinai with the truth,” Rothenberg reflected.

The current surge of elections predictions is centered on models that use a combination of factors — polling, demographics, historical results, to name a few — to put a number on the probability that a race will turn out one way or the other. That can make it seem like forecasts are objective measurements, when in fact they rely on many subjective decisions, said Natalie Jackson, a longtime pollster who is now vice president at Democratic polling firm GQR.

“They’re treated as a lot more concrete than they should be,” Jackson said.

Explaining Election Day: Understanding the processes from voting to declaring winners

The Associated Press has created a series of videos explaining how elections work in the United States.

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