Brain Food: October Surprise
Election season is about to get a whole lot more interesting!
Brain Food: October Surprise is an election forecasting course for older students who are ready to go beyond basic civics and ask a tricky question: Can you predict who is going to win an election?
Click here for a flip through video of Brain Food: October Surprise.
Students will learn how political scientists and professional election forecasters analyze real races using polling, historical trends, candidate quality, voter turnout, partisan lean, and more. Then they’ll choose a real election to follow throughout the course, track what happens as Election Day approaches, and make their own evidence-based prediction.
And because forecasting is not the same thing as rooting for your team to win, students will practice separating what they want to happen from what the evidence suggests is likely to happen. The course introduces the wonderfully useful concept of wishcasting and challenges students to recognize their own assumptions, acknowledge uncertainty, and change their thinking when the evidence changes.
In other words, this is a course about U.S. elections, but it’s really a course about how to think critically.
What Students Will Learn
Across 13 lessons, students explore:
The difference between predicting and guessing
How election polling works
Sampling, weighting, likely voter screens, and margin of error
What can go wrong with polls
How to read polling averages
Race ratings such as Toss-Up, Tilt, Lean, Likely, and Safe
Shy voters, undecided voters, and double haters
Incumbency advantage, partisan lean, and wave elections
How candidate quality, fundraising, messaging, and baggage can affect a race
How forecasters weigh several conflicting pieces of evidence
How to forecast a presidential election state by state
Why voter turnout can completely change an election
What an October surprise is and why some things simply cannot be predicted
How to make a final election forecast and evaluate it honestly after the votes are counted
Following a Real Race
Early in the course, students choose a competitive upcoming race to follow. As they learn new forecasting tools, they return to that race to investigate its candidates, polling, political history, fundraising, turnout, and new developments.
By Election Day, they’ve been watching their race for weeks. They’ll predict who will win, by how much, and why. After the election, students compare their prediction with what actually happened. They'll consider whether an incorrect prediction came from a flaw in their reasoning or from information that just wasn’t available when they made the prediction.
Getting the answer right is fun, but figuring out why you were right or wrong is where the real learning happens!
An Especially Fun Course for Election Season
Brain Food: October Surprise will work best if it is completed alongside a real U.S. midterm or presidential election.
We recommend beginning in September and completing about one or two lessons per week. The final lessons are timed to take students right through Election Day and into the days immediately afterward.
Who Is This Course For?
We recommend this course for approximately grades 6 through 12, specifically for students who already have a basic understanding of U.S. civics. Students should be familiar with concepts such as democracy, voting, political parties, primary and general elections, state and federal offices, and the Electoral College. This course is based on the U.S. political system and will not apply to elections outside the United States.
About the Author
Jackson Sodano earned his Master of Arts in Political Science from Ohio University at age twenty. In 2025, he received Ohio University’s Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant Award for his work in American Public Policy Administration.
His academic interests include U.S. electoral politics, political communication, third parties, and public policy analysis. Jackson is also the author of Hearth & Story’s How to Take Notes, How to Plan a Big Project, Brain Food: Uphill Through the Snow Both Ways, and Brain Food: Made Ya Think!