From: <http://www.nytimes.com/library/politics/camp/090400wh-gore2.html> September 4, 2000 And the Winner Is Gore, if They Got the Math Right By ADAM CLYMER WASHINGTON, Sept. 3 -- For many people who live here, presidential politics is an exciting and uncertain enterprise, where the fate of an ideological principle or, more important, a career, may hang on a slip in a debate or a brilliant 30-second commercial. But for seven visitors seeking to impose a precision and predictability on political life that even those working in its midst cannot discern, Vice President Al Gore has already beaten Gov. George W. Bush of Texas -- sort of. Those seven political scientists, among the more than 2,000 who gathered here this weekend for the 96th annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, have precise mathematical formulas that, if taken at face value, mean that the candidates, their handlers and the press should take the next nine weeks off. Then, the day after Election Day, everyone could look up to see whether Mr. Gore's winning percentage of the two-party vote was the 52.8 forecast by James E. Campbell of the State University of New York at Buffalo, the 60.3 expected by Thomas M. Holbrook of the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, or something between. The political scientists presented their formulas at a panel on Thursday. The predictions of six of the formulas depend heavily on the health of the economy, by one measure or another, and on presidential popularity or the candidates' standings in Labor Day polls. The seventh, offered by Helmut Norpoth of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, depends on how the nominee of the incumbent party did in the New Hampshire primary. Mr. Norpoth's formula, which allows a forecast as soon as the incumbent party's nominee is clear (in March this year), gave Mr. Gore 55 percent. At one level, the formulas reflect the continuing tendency of political science to seek numerical precision by relating disparate facts: comparing roll call votes with House re-election rates, for example, or determining the frequency of pork-barrel spending by senators of different parties. In recent decades, one trend in political science as a discipline has been a struggle to seem as precise as physics, with equations as the tool. But at another level, these formulas reflect an underlying advantage for the Gore campaign, an economics-based edge that these students of past elections say it will take major efforts by one or both campaigns to overcome. Alan Abramowitz of Emory University said the data reflected the assumption that presidential elections are "largely a reflection on the performance of the incumbent president and the state of the economy." But his formula and some of the others also include a discount when a party is seeking to hold the White House for a third term or more. That is one reason why despite President Clinton's high poll ratings and a booming economy, Mr. Abramowitz's forecast was toward the lower end of the range, expecting Mr. Gore to get 53.2 percent. Mr. Holbrook said his formula and the others assumed that "both candidates will run pretty good campaigns." In 1988, he acknowledged, Governor Bush's father outperformed the predictions because his opponent, Gov. Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts, ran a poor general election campaign. Mr. Campbell, the lone acknowledged Republican on the panel, said that in past elections "glitches and gaffes" had accounted for no more than one or two percentage points. "Most of us are predicting that the fundamentals will shift the campaign so that it's pretty remote" that Mr. Bush will win, he said. Elsewhere at the meeting, the panelists' colleagues were treating the election as something still worth studying. One group listened while producers of television commercials discounted their own importance. Ray Strother, a Democratic media consultant, said that political advertisements often "don't work anymore." Noting that they are shown much more frequently than they were 30 years ago, he asked, "If ads are better, why do we have to show them three times more often to make them work?" At another session, three Rutgers University political scientists examined the press coverage of Elizabeth Dole's campaign for the Republican nomination. Caroline Heldman, Susan J. Carroll and Stephanie Olson argued that "the repeated references to Bob Dole in article after article may have subtly undermined her independent stature as a presidential candidate in the minds of voters." But the forecasters, taking comfort in their unanimity of expected result, were sticking by what the panel's chairman, James C. Garand of Louisiana State University, admitted some colleagues sneered at as "recreational political science." As Christopher Wiezien of the University of Houston, with a 55.2 percent forecast for Mr. Gore, observed, "He still might lose, but based on our analysis, it's not very likely." ================================================================= Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT FROM THE DESK OF: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> *Mike Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ~~~~~~~~ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum, and to all, A Good Day. ================================================================= <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. 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