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Primary Colors: A Mixed Blessing for Al Gore

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 May 2002

Helmut Norpoth
Helmut Norpoth
Affiliation:
SUNY, Stony Brook
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Extract

Having nailed down his party's presidential nomination with an early and decisive victory in the primaries, Al Gore will go on to defeat George W. Bush in the general election by a comfortable margin. The Democratic ticket, so the prediction, will take 55% of the major-party popular vote in November, compared to 45% for the Republican one—almost exactly the reverse of what national polls have been showing as late as June of the election year.

– A forecast issued July 26, 2000

“Prophecy is good business, but full of risks,” warned Mark Twain. How true in this election. Even though Al Gore edged George W. Bush by half-a-million votes in the popular count, he certainly did not win by the “comfortable margin” I predicted more than two months before the event. What was the basis of my prediction? And what may have cut it short?

Type
Research Article
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , March 2001 , pp. 45 - 48
Copyright
© 2001 by the American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

*I am grateful to numerous people for their comments, curiosity, and questions about this forecasting exercise, espectially Bob Kaiser, Mike Kagay, Dan Markle, James Warren, Adam Clymer, David Miller, Alan Elsner, and Katherine Reynolds. The forecast was presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association. Thanks go to Jim Garand for setting up the panel.