With Bush that weak, working in the White House wasn’t just a fantasy anymore.
—GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS, night of New Hampshire Primary, 1992
With another Bush looking weak, many Democrats nowadays are bound to feel good about their
prospects in November, even without the dream of a job in the White House for themselves. “Time for a
change” has a popular ring this election year. Yet this time, a Bush won’t be on the presidential ballot in
November. For the model used here to forecast the outcome of the 2008 election, the absence of a sitting
president from the race is no problem. The model does not use presidential approval or the state of the
economy as predictors. Instead it relies on the performance of the presidential nominees in primaries
(hence the sobriquet PRIMARY MODEL).
American elections in November are typically preceded by
“primary” elections earlier in the year. So is the voting in presidential primaries a leading indicator of the
vote in November? Remarkably so, as it turns out. How well presidential candidates do in primary
elections foretells their prospects in the November election with great accuracy.
The PRIMARY MODEL treats the primary performance of the incumbent-party candidate and that of the
opposition-party candidate as two separate predictors. For elections since 1952, the primary-support
measure relies solely on the New Hampshire primary, while using all primaries prior to that date. The
model is estimated with data from presidential elections going back as far as 1912, the first year of
presidential primaries, with an adjustment applied to partisanship for pre-New Deal elections. In addition
to primaries, the forecast model takes advantage of a cycle in presidential elections that appears related to
the two-term limit of the American presidency. The out-of-sample forecasts of the PRIMARY MODEL
pick the popular-vote winner in all but one of those 24 elections.
2
Convention