From: dsvoss@isr.harvard.edu (Steve Voss)
Newsgroups: alt.politics.clinton,alt.news-media,talk.politics.misc
Subject: Re: Campaign final few days' conservative slide
Keywords: significant words from a document used as an index to content
Date: 9 Sep 92 20:48:08 GMT
Organization: Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

You guys have been debating the likelihood of Bush making his comeback.
I really don't think anyone knows for sure, but as a poli sci type
I thought I would give you some additional data.

One guy said since Dukakis increased several percentage points
right before the election then we can perhaps expect Clinton to
do the same.  But you can't generalize from 1988 to the American
system as a whole.  If you look over the elections since WWII,
the pattern is for the leader to drop regardless of party.
For example, Ford made a big last-minute comeback against Carter.

Here is a table of the years with the difference between poll results
50 days before the election and the election itself:
1952  Eisenhower  dropped about 2%
1956  Eisenhower  stayed about even
1960  Kennedy     dropped at most 1%  
1964  Johnson     dropped about 7-8%
1968  Nixon       dropped 10%
1972  Nixon       dropped 2-3%
1976  Carter      dropped 7-8%
1980  Reagan      climbed 5-6%
1984  Reagan      dropped 2%
1988  Bush        stayed about even if you average the polls

If you average the changes over elections (which is a completely
meaningless statistic), you find that on average the leading candidate
drops about 3% in the last 50 days.  If you throw out Reagan's first
election, which is a notable exception to the trend, you get a
drop approaching 4% on average.  I give you this because I
think this is what the first post was seeking.  But you can't
conclude much from this.

If you compare this election to Carter's, they may seem fairly
close.  So perhaps we should expect Clinton to drop about 7%.
Regardless of the poll you read, that puts the thing within a
3-4% margin of error, does it not?

By the way, political scientists think they can predict elections
long before they take place.  The belief seems to be that the
actual campaign matters very little other than a way for voters
to get information, so if political scientists plug the "info"
that voters will get (such as candidate's party affiliations,
the state of the economy, the number of soldiers killed in
military activity, etc.) you can peg the eventual voting
pattern.  So far, these models have done quite well, far better
than the polls you read about in the papers.  But this election
will be a true test because of the closeness.  The professors
have a high variation in their predictions this time, because
they weight factors such as employment, inflation and the advantage
of incumbency differently and this is the first time it's making
a significant difference in their predictions.  The only thing
that is clear so far is the following:

None of the political scientists are predicting a big
Clinton victory.  Of the four models with which I am
familiar, Clinton wins one with less than 53% of the
vote, another with less than 52% (these models are very
similar).  The other two models give Bush a very narrow
victory (59% or so of the electoral college) or a
landslide (something ridiculous like 56% of the popular
vote; I suspect this guy is sweating right now).
I should mention that these are not just some professors'
best guesses; they've developed these statistical models
carefully by finding the correlation between presidential
vote and a number of political factors.  The problems are
not with the method, but with the lack of data (only 11 presidential
elections at which to look).

If you're interested, I've bet $20 that Bush gets between 51-53%
of the vote.

steve
Newsgroups: alt.politics.clinton,alt.news-media,talk.politics.misc