Yeah, one of my old Political Science profs made the news a few decades ago. It seems his prediction model was stunningly accurate in previous elections. The prof appeared on several network news segments and got written up in major periodicals.
But one year, he was wrong. I don't remember which year it was. It might have been 1988 (Elder Bush vs. Dukakis), but I'm not sure about that. Anyway, his model didn't pan out and he was pretty much pushed aside in later years.
I have a soft place in my heart for this professor. It was during one of his classes that all students had to make oral presenations on various political topics. I chose as one of my topics the proposition that the telephone system was NOT a natural monopoly and ought not to be regulated as such. My classmates were VERY critical of my presentation, but after they had all had their say, the professor stunned them by saying that my propositions didn't seem nutty to him. I took an unpopular position, but I supported it and I stood my ground. This professor liked that.
And it turned out that I was right. Within less than a decade, there was the break-up of the Bell system, the deregulation of several telephone services, the advent of phone competition, and the rise of cellular service. The phone company wasn't a natural monopoly after all.
