A look at past elections shows the 2016 presidential race will be extremely tight

The 2016 presidential election is well over two years away and there is much we do not know about how the race will unfold. The candidates, economic conditions, and just about everything else are factors that have not yet been determined. Drawing on elections from the past sixty years, James E. Campbell argues that the 2016 race will almost certainly fall within a 45-55 percent split, and is likely to be even closer. He writes that such close races are good for election forecasters because it is more difficult to be too far off from the actual vote, but that the compressed outcomes can unrealistically raise the expectations of forecast accuracy.