As early as August, some of political science's leading lights predicted a fairly comfortable win Tuesday for Al Gore. It's not looking very likely now, I have to admit,'' said Helmut Norpoth, a political scientist from the State University of New York, Stonybrook. He was one of seven top academics who presented statistical models predicting the outcome of Tuesday's election at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in August. If I'm just wrong, the nice thing is I'm the least wrong one in the bunch,'' said University of Georgia political scientist Brad Lockerbie, who forecast one of the slimmest wins for Gore, with 52.9 percent. Polls show the race competitive, and likely to be settled in a handful of states where neither contender has a decisive edge.
Attention is centered on places like Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Missouri.
With such a tight race, scholars are edgy, watching polls veer toward and away from their statistical predictions and talking about the fallible nature of their models. He's not capitalizing on the thing that made him a strong candidate, which was the record of the Clinton Administration.'' ''We could all be wrong,'' said James Campbell, a University of Buffalo professor who predicted Gore would capture 52.8 percent of a major party vote. That can partially be explained, he said, by the fact that polls were running high for Clinton in 1996. This time around, Gore's campaign ''sort of doesn't claim credit for the economy at this point,'' he said. Using voting and economic data stretching back decades, each professor's model took into account different factors.