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On Forecasting the Presidential Vote

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 May 2002

Christopher Wlezien
Christopher Wlezien
Affiliation:
University of Houston
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Extract

“He's breaking every political scientist's heart.” Mark Shields, commenting on the Gore campaign for The Newshour with Jim Lehrer on election eve, November 6, 2000

It did not look good for Gore leading up to Election Day. Five days before the election, not a single national poll had Gore ahead. Indeed, the polls at that time showed Bush leading by four percentage points on average (see Table 1). Bush was campaigning in California, and the rumors were that he already had shut down his own internal polling. Even on election eve, only two polls (CBS and Zogby/MSNBC) showed Gore ahead. In these final preelection polls, Bush was leading by 1.7 percentage points on average, and with a pooled N of over 10,000 respondents! At midnight, as Election Day began, the Iowa Political Stock Market vote share market indicated a commanding Bush lead of 4.5 points and the winner-take-all market put the effective probability of a Bush victory at 71%. Some political commentators were writing Gore's epitaph (Kurtz 2000). His one hope, it appeared, was to win the Electoral College vote despite losing the popular vote.

Type
Research Article
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , March 2001 , pp. 25 - 31
Copyright
© 2001 by the American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

* The article is based, in part, on research presented at the 2000 annual meeting of the Southern Political Science Association, which was held in Atlanta, and at a conference at Baylor University. Portions of the data were collected under a grant from the National Science Foundation (SBR-9731308). I thank Jose Bocanegra and Jeff May for assistance with data collection and Henry C. Adams Jr., James Campbell, James Glaser, Richard Johnston, and Tim Nokken for comments.