(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is a strong favorite to be elected, according to professional forecasters. They raised his probability of victory by 3 percentage points a day after a wild debate in which President Trump repeatedly interrupted Biden and moderator Chris Wallace, while the former vice president called Trump a clown, a liar, and a racist.
Good Judgment Inc. says the median estimate of its team of forecasters as of Sept. 30 was that Biden had a 78% chance of victory, up from 75% on Sept. 29 and the highest figure since Aug. 18. In February the unchosen Democratic presidential candidate was given less than a 40% chance of victory. Since then the forecasters have steadily upped their estimates of victory for the Democrat, who we now know is Biden. His chances peaked at 82% in late July. There's been little change since.
Good Judgment is a company that maintains a global network of forecasters to make predictions based on publicly available evidence. They work on contract. While most of their work is done for paying clients, Good Judgment itself is paying them for their prognostications on the presidential race.
The overnight increase in Biden's victory chances was not attributed specifically to the debate, but it seems likely to have played a big part in the forecasters' reassessment, since it was the biggest political event of the past 24 hours.
The election forecasting model of poll aggregator FiveThirtyEight, released Sept. 30, also gives Biden a 78% chance of winning the Electoral College—78.4%, to be precise. The methodology is different, so it's pure coincidence that they came up with the same probability.
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