This is a history of illegitimacy in America. And here is my text, drawn from three Russians, who understand illegitimacy better than anyone else.

In June 2008, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration rocked the food industry—and food lovers—with its warning about tainted tomatoes. Consumers in New Mexico and Texas were contracting a rare, sometimes fatal strain of salmonella and the FDA feared that salmonella contamination from tomatoes was the cause. In the weeks that followed, a major outbreak spread across the country and worried consumers abandoned tomatoes. Fourth of July cookouts were not the same, and BLT lovers complained that their favorite sandwich was impossibly dry. By the end of July, the outbreak had infected more than 1,200 persons in 42 states.

The October 2008 issue of PS published a symposium of presidential and congressional forecasts made in the summer leading up to the election. This article is an assessment of the accuracy of their models.

On September 8, 2008, the Trial-heat Forecasting Model predicted that in-party candidate Senator John McCain would receive 52.7% of the national two-party popular presidential vote. The forecast of a victory of modest proportions for Senator McCain reflected his having a five-percentage-point lead over Senator Barack Obama in Gallup's early September, post-convention poll (49% to 44%) and the Bureau of Economic Analysis' August report of a 3.3% GDP growth rate in the second quarter of the year, about average for a second quarter election year economy.

The October 2008 issue of PS published a symposium of presidential and congressional forecasts made in the summer leading up to the election. This article is an assessment of the accuracy of their models.

The Primary Model predicted that Barack Obama would win a narrow victory with 50.1% of the major-party vote. Obama surpassed that forecast by just a little more than one standard error (2.5). How come the model came as close as it did with a forecast issued as early as January? What prevented it from coming even closer? And what might be done to improve the model?

The October 2008 issue of PS published a symposium of presidential and congressional forecasts made in the summer leading up to the election. This article is an assessment of the accuracy of their models.

In summer 2008, our Jobs Model forecast a Democratic presidential candidate two-party popular vote share of 56.6%, which would deliver the incumbent party the biggest defeat of any post-World War II contest (Lewis-Beck and Tien 2008). However, we argued, from our analysis of different experimental and observational evidence, that this unprecedented victory would be prevented by racially intolerant voters. We estimated the net racial cost of being a black candidate and corrected our overall forecast downward to 50.1% for Barack Obama. The unparalleled economic crisis, initiated after the release of our summer forecasts, prompted a reconsideration; the unique shock to the economy was no ordinary campaign perturbation. We calculated that the ensuing boost to anti-incumbent economic voting would add approximately two percentage points to the opposition; therefore, we issued a public revision of our forecast to 52.0 % for Obama (Lewis-Beck 2008). We are pleased that this final forecast fell so close to the actual result of 53.5%. Nevertheless, we contend the actual result should have been much closer to our original forecast. Given the dismal state of the polity and the economy prior to the election, the Obama victory should have been much bigger, as we show below.

The October 2008 issue of PS published a symposium of presidential and congressional forecasts made in the summer leading up to the election. This article is an assessment of the accuracy of their models.

The Time-for-Change Model proved one of the most accurate of the 2008 presidential election forecasts run in the October PS symposium. Using three predictors—the president's approval rating at mid-year, the growth rate of real GDP during the second quarter, and the time-for-change dummy variable—the model predicted that Barack Obama would win the presidential election with 54.3% of the major-party vote. According to nearly final tabulations compiled by uselections.org, as of December 8, Obama has received just over 53.6% of the major-party vote. However, it is likely that Obama's final total will reach 53.7% of the major-party vote. Therefore, the model's current error of 0.9 percentage points is likely to decrease further. The model has now correctly predicted the winner of the popular vote in all six presidential elections since its creation in 1988.

The October 2008 issue of PS published a symposium of presidential and congressional forecasts made in the summer leading up to the election. This article is an assessment of the accuracy of their models.

Prior to the 2008 presidential election we provided forecasts of the final vote relying on a model containing only two variables: (1) the cumulated weighted growth in leading economic indicators (LEI) through the thirteenth quarter of the sitting president's term; and (2) the incumbent party candidate's share in the most recent trial-heat polls. The novelty is the reliance on the advanced reading of the economy from the quarter ending in March of the election year. (The exact equation and the exact forecast change as the poll readings get closer to the election.) Our final forecast (Erikson and Wlezien 2008) based on trial-heat polls in August was that Barack Obama would win 52.2% of the two-party popular vote. This turned out to be quite close to the Election Day outcome of 53.5% (as of December 2), a little more than one percentage point above what we predicted.

The October 2008 issue of PS published a symposium of presidential and congressional forecasts made in the summer leading up to the election. This article is an assessment of the accuracy of their models.

The Incumbency and National Conditions Model predicted that John McCain would receive 44.3% of the two-party presidential vote; he ended up with 46.6% (at this writing, November 13, 2008), yielding a prediction error of 2.4 points. This error is slightly smaller than the mean absolute value of the out-of-sample forecasts from 1952 to 2004 (2.68), so the 2008 election result is not anomalous in the context of this model. The addition to the model of the 2008 outcome does not generate many important changes to the coefficients, except that the significance of incumbency interaction went from 0.08 to 0.02 and the standard error and adjusted R2 of the model both indicate a slight improvement in fit.

The October 2008 issue of PS published a symposium of presidential and congressional forecasts made in the summer leading up to the election. This article is an assessment of the accuracy of their models.

At its most basic level, the Economic Expectations and Time-for-a-Change Model performed well in that it successfully forecast a Barack Obama victory. It was in estimating the two-party vote that the model underperformed. The point estimate was off by just under five percentage points. While not terrible, the model did not perform as well as it did in earlier years.

The October 2008 issue of PS published a symposium of presidential and congressional forecasts made in the summer leading up to the election. This article is an assessment of the accuracy of their models.

The presidential election forecast made with the Fiscal Model three months before Election Day put the incumbents' share of the two-party vote (VOTE2) at 48% (Cuzán and Bundrick 2008). As of the time of this writing, it appears the incumbent-party ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin took a little less than that (around 46.5%). At 1.5%, the error is less than 2.3%, which is Campbell's (2008, 680) “benchmark” for a “quite accurate” forecast. This is the second time in a row that the Fiscal Model ranks among the best performers (Campbell 2005, 23).

The October 2008 issue of PS published a symposium of presidential and congressional forecasts made in the summer leading up to the election. This article is an assessment of the accuracy of their models.

Ninety-nine days before the elections I utilized national- and district- or state-level information to forecast the 2008 U.S. presidential, House, and Senate elections (Klarner 2008). Overall, the presidential model performed very well, while the House and Senate models understated the extent of the Democratic wave.

The 2008 presidential nomination was marked by the most aggressive frontloading in recent history; the process was a mess from the outset. Frontloading is the trend in recent presidential nominations in which states schedule their primaries and caucuses near the beginning of the delegate-selection season to have a greater impact on the process. In 1976, 10% of the delegates had been chosen by March 2. In 2008, 70% of the delegates had been chosen by that same date. As part of their ongoing efforts to address frontloading and other problems, both the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Republican National Committee (RNC) revised the schedules and rules for 2008 presidential primary elections and caucuses.

The current method for selecting presidential nominees by the two major parties went into place mostly in 1972 and certainly by 1976, after Buckely v. Valeo. It was the natural culmination of reform efforts over the history of the republic in that, while prior reforms consistently invoked greater openness and democratic governance as rationales for their adoption, this method actually empowered voters as the central figures in determining who would be nominated (see Aldrich 1987). This fact became fully evident almost at once. The selection via primaries of senator George McGovern in 1972 and governor Jimmy Carter in 1976 as the Democratic presidential nominees arguably not only would not have happened, they would not have even come close to winning nomination without successful appeal to the voting public.

There are perhaps many good arguments for Iowa maintaining its “first in the nation” status, in terms of the presidential nomination process. The strongest, however, would seem to be an argument that it is representative of the nation as a whole. That is, somehow, Iowa is a microcosm of the national political forces, faithfully mirroring the relevant electoral structures and choices of the macro-stage. This belief is certainly held by some. Palo Alto County, in northwestern Iowa, has long been considered a presidential bellwether, faithfully voting with the winning candidate in a series beginning in 1916. But as media worthy as that fact might be, it seems most likely a product of chance, for its heavily rural, northern European-descended population make it far from demographically representative of contemporary America (Lewis-Beck and Rice 1992, 4–6). A similar charge is commonly made today against the state as a whole, by political commentators across the land. But is it true? Is Iowa really unrepresentative? That is the question we seek to answer.

This article explores how results from Iowa may affect outcomes in subsequent nomination contests. We suggest that how Iowa matters may be determined, at least in part, by how voters and the news media assess whether or not candidates meet or exceed expectations there.

Just as radio and television revolutionized the presidential election process in earlier decades, today the “new media” are making a significant imprint on how campaigns are conducted by candidates, covered by journalists, and evaluated by the voters. While the same basic goals for campaigns apply, the tools to accomplish these goals have expanded.

Forty years ago, violent protests at the Democratic National Convention captured the attention of the nation as rioters vented their anger over a nomination process they felt excluded their voices. The disastrous 1968 convention spawned a cascade of reforms in the presidential nomination system, many of which were intended to create greater opportunity for meaningful participation of the party's rank-and-file members. Forty years later, where do we stand? Does the nomination process meet the goals of encouraging broad participation and connecting rank-and-file preferences to nomination outcomes? We offer some tentative answers to these questions by tracing the history of the nomination process, its evolution over the last 40 years, and the implications of several key changes in the system for citizen participation.

In a book published four years ago, Andrew Busch and I divided proposals to reform the presidential nomination process into two categories, which we called comprehensive and incremental (see Mayer and Busch 2004, chapter 5). Like any attempt to classify a complex reality, this distinction blurs a bit at the edges, but the basic idea should be clear. Comprehensive proposals call for major, far-reaching changes in the basic operations of the presidential nomination process; incremental proposals make more limited, marginal changes in the rules, while retaining the fundamental structure of the existing system.

As part of their ongoing efforts to address frontloading and other perceived problems, both the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Republican National Committee (RNC) proposed revised schedules and rules for 2008. The major changes for the Democrats were that two new states were allowed to join Iowa and New Hampshire in violating the official February 5 start date. The idea was that these states—Nevada from the West and South Carolina from the South—would enhance participation by more diverse populations (Latinos and African Americans). While the Republican rules called for states to lose half of their delegate vote if they violated the timing rules, the Democrats implemented a “death penalty” requiring any state violating the timing rules to lose all of its delegates. The New York Times called these changes the biggest shift in the way Democrats have nominated their presidential candidates in 30 years. Yet in the end these changes did little to lessen frontloading, as 70% of all delegates were actually chosen by the beginning of March. Two large states (Michigan and Florida) defied both national parties and voted before February 5.