Party Competition and Media Messages

THE PARADOX At one point during the 1988 campaign, Michael Dukakis was ahead in the public opinion polls by 17 percentage points, but he eventually lost the election by 8 percent. Walter Mondale was ahead in the polls by 4 percent during the 1984 campaign but lost the election in a landslide. During June and July of 1992, Clinton, Bush, and Perot each had turns in the public opinion poll lead. What explains all this poll variation? Why do so many citizens change their minds so quickly about presidential choices? But wait. The story gets more complicated. It turns out that political scientists can actually predict the outcome of the election with information available at the start of the general election campaign. That may seem odd, and perhaps a well-kept secret from the general public, but predicting presidential elections is a relatively straightforward problem that has largely been solved. Predicting primaries and many other elections is a lot harder, but general elections for president have been successfully predicted four to five months ahead of time, to an accuracy of a few percentage points, for at least the past half-dozen elections. So now we really have a paradox: Polls vary widely, academic political scientists can predict the election outcome before the campaign begins, and strategists on all sides spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to influence an outcome that was predicted before they spent anything! What's a political analyst to make of all this? We provide some answers to these questions here.