The October 2008 issue of PS published a symposiumof presidential and congressional forecasts made in the summerleading up to the election. This article is an assessment of theaccuracy of their models.

In summer 2008, our Jobs Model forecast a Democratic presidentialcandidate two-party popular vote share of 56.6%, which would deliverthe incumbent party the biggest defeat of any post-World War IIcontest (Lewis-Beck and Tien 2008). However, we argued, from our analysis ofdifferent experimental and observational evidence, that thisunprecedented victory would be prevented by racially intolerantvoters. We estimated the net racial cost of being a black candidateand corrected our overall forecast downward to 50.1% for BarackObama. The unparalleled economic crisis, initiated after the releaseof our summer forecasts, prompted a reconsideration; the uniqueshock to the economy was no ordinary campaign perturbation. Wecalculated that the ensuing boost to anti-incumbent economic votingwould add approximately two percentage points to the opposition;therefore, we issued a public revision of our forecast to 52.0 % forObama (Lewis-Beck 2008).We are pleased that this final forecast fell so close to the actualresult of 53.5%. Nevertheless, we contend the actual result shouldhave been much closer to our original forecast. Given the dismalstate of the polity and the economy prior to the election, the Obamavictory should have been much bigger, as we show below.