Since then, their lead has eroded to barely three points. With the parties at parity, neither candidate had an audience of voters either more hostile or more receptive than did the other. Beyond these two factors, however, the campaign took unusual twists and turns that, in the end, brought us to a near dead heat. Take the economy. According to Gallup polls, the number of Americans saying that the economy was good or excellent more than doubled from 1992 to 1996 and more than doubled again in 2000.
Voters normally give credit to the in-party candidate when the economy is strong.
A successor might not receive the same credit as the incumbent, but he could take a big share of it. Largely because of this, all of the election forecasting models predicted that Gore would win the popular vote and all overestimated the size of the vote for Gore. My own model, based on the Labor Day preference polls and the second quarter growth rate in the economy, predicted that Gore would receive about 52.8 percent of the two-party vote. While there are several possible explanations for why the models overpredicted the vote for Gore, the most plausible is Gore s campaign. In an effort to steer clear of fallout from the Clinton scandals, Gore ran a prospective rather than the anticipated retrospective campaign.