September (Web-only) 2000

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If you are a political junkie, this is the time you live for: the closing stretch of a presidential campaign. Every day brings another pile of stories: "G.O.P Leaders Fret at Lapses in Bush's Race," for instance, right next to "Gore Offers Vision of Better Times for Middle Class." (Hey, whatever happened to "working families"?) Debates are just around the corner, and meanwhile there's the debate over the format of the debates.

I hate to be the one to rain on your parade, but according to a covy of political scientists, all this campaign hoopla is just a big show. As Robert Kaiser writes in the Washington Post, reporting on the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Washington, D.C., seven academic number-crunchers have announced that "Campaign 2000 is effectively over."

Indeed, Alan Abramowitz of Emory University says that "the outcome of a presidential election can be accurately predicted based on factors that are known well before the official campaign gets under way."

But what about the carefully crafted and obscenely expensive attack ads? The personal appearances (Gore's all-nighter, for instance, or "Bush Planning to Emphasize Town Meetings")? The dueling plans to spend the budget surplus?

No, it doesn't mean diddley, Abramowitz says, fingering his calculator: "Despite the time, effort, and money devoted to campaigning, there is very little that the candidates can do during September and October to alter the eventual outcome of a presidential election."

So what does determine the outcome of the election? Well, Kaiser explains, "Abramowitz's model—using a complex mathematical formula—combines economic growth in the first half of the election year, the popularity of the incumbent president July 1, ...