The Incumbency and National Conditions (presidential approval and aggregated personal finances) Model predicted President Obama would garner 47.9% of the two-party vote, whereas he ended up with 51.8% (based on available information on December 3, 2012). The error in this forecast (3.9 points) is somewhat higher than the average out-of-sample error from 1952 to 2008 (2.4 points). Although the forecast was off the mark, the addition of the 2012 result to the data set does little to change the slope estimates, and the overall fit of the model is only slightly worse (table 1).