1. The contemporary presidential nomination process is unusually favorable to frontrunners

If this point now seems widely accepted, it was most certainly not that way when I first formulated the model. To the contrary, for at least two decades after the rules were re-written in the early 1970s, the conventional wisdom was precisely the opposite: that the new system offered great advantages to outsiders and insurgents. As Robert Scheer of the Los Angeles Times put it, “There's a special problem with the drawn out system of primaries and caucuses. What it allows is for an unknown to get in” (Foley et al. 1980, 44).

But it wasn't just those dreaded journalists and pundits who reached this conclusion. The same verdict was pronounced in some of the very best academic writing on the subject. One of the bestknown models of the primary election process is that of Brady and Johnston (1987). As they conclude in the very last sentence of their article: “The lesson, then, of this analysis is that being the favorite is a mixed blessing, and one might better be a newcomer with media appeal and a little luck in Iowa or New Hampshire” (184). Larry Bartels (1988) ended his award-winning book on presidential primaries on a similar note. Characterizing the current system as one with a “remarkable open-ness to new candidates,” he added, “In many political systems positions of party leadership are earned through decades of toil in the party organization. In contemporary American politics the same positions are sometimes seized, almost literally overnight, by candidates with negligible party credentials and very short histories as national public figures” (287). James Ceaser (1982), who approached these issues from a more historical and theoretical perspective, pronounced a similar verdict: “When the effects of sequence in the primaries and the influence of the media are taken into consideration, the nominating campaign often becomes not simply a test among established national contenders, but an occasion for outsiders to make their reputation during the campaign itself. In this respect, the current system is more open than the pure convention system and the mixed nominating system” (95).

From the late 1970s through the early 1990s, academic writing about the presidential nomination process was saturated with this perspective. (In addition to the sources just quoted, see Sundquist 1980, 193–94; Mann 1985, 35–36; Keeter and Zukin 1983, 190–93; and King 1981.) Even in the mid- and late 1990s, many scholars continued to argue, as Mackenzie (1996) did in his book on political reform, that “[The contemporary presidential nomination] process has a strong tendency to promote the candidacies of outsiders who have little or no Washington experience and who are often strangers to the leading members of their own party” (50).

The most important point of my excursion into election forecasting was to assert the opposite: that in almost every recent nomination race, the candidate who ultimately won was the person leading before any of the delegates were selected. Indeed, in seven of the last 10 contested nomination races, the eventual nominee was leading in the national polls for at least a year before the Iowa caucuses. To say the least, this is not a system characterized by its openness to new faces.

2. As a factor in the presidential nomination process, momentum is greatly overrated

If the pre-race frontrunner usually wins, then one must also conclude that momentum is nowhere near the overwhelming force that it is frequently portrayed to be. Momentum can be compared to a roller-coaster ride: it provides a lot of thrills and excitement, but in the end it leaves us exactly where we started. And so it is in presidential politics: After all the effects of momentum have come and gone, the person who started out ahead almost always finishes ahead. Put another way, if you're interested in figuring out why John McCain went from 15% to 34% in the national polls within five days of his New Hampshire victory, momentum clearly provides the best explanation. But if your main interest is in who finally wins the nomination, momentum is really of very little help at all. Not since Jimmy Carter's campaign in 1976 has a momentum-driven candidacy been successful.

3. Frontrunners almost invariably stumble at some point in the process—but these mistakes, for all the media attention they receive, are rarely fatal

If front-runners usually triumph in the end, their road to the nomination is never an entirely smooth one. Bad stuff happens. Bob Dole lost the New Hampshire, Delaware, and Arizona primaries; George Bush lost in New Hampshire and Michigan; and Al Gore spent the better part of 1999 squandering his lead in both the polls and in fundraising (on Gore's early missteps, see Mayer 2001, 23–26). But all of these candidates also had real strengths, that were not entirely overwhelmed by a few weeks of bad campaign-related publicity. Each recovered his footing—rather quickly, in fact—and ultimately racked up a long string of victories in the presidential primaries.

4. The longer we live under the current system, the more we learn about it—and this, too, works to the advantage of frontrunners

There are a number of reasons why Jimmy Carter won the 1976 Democratic nomination against a series of better-known and better-financed opponents, but one of the most important is simply that the nomination process was then new and not very well understood. Carter and his advisors figured out what it took to win in the new environment; many of his chief opponents (in particular, Henry Jackson) were less astute. But the longer the current system endures, the more its basic quirks and tendencies have become a matter of common knowledge. The net effect of all this learning and experience has been to create a fair amount of uniformity in basic campaign strategy—and thus to neutralize the advantage that any one candidate can derive from “playing the game” better than his or her opponents. And if campaign strategy doesn't matter, presidential nomination races will be decided more and more on the basis of such fundamental factors as popularity and money—resources that frontrunners, almost by definition, will have in greater supply than their competitors.

A good example of how campaign learning works against outsiders and insurgents is provided by the contrast in how two early front-runners—Walter Mondale and Robert Dole—dealt with opponents who tried to ride a “better than expected” showing in Iowa to a breakthrough win in New Hampshire. When Mondale scored a resounding victory in the 1984 Iowa caucuses, he and his campaign strategists fully expected that win to propel them to another win eight days later in New Hampshire, where Mondale was already well ahead in the polls. In fact, the candidate with the momentum turned out to be Gary Hart, who had finished 30 percentage points behind Mondale in Iowa but had nevertheless managed to convince the press that he was now Mondale's chief rival. What is noteworthy for our purposes is that the Mondale campaign never really saw it coming until the very end (see Germond and Witcover 1985, 161–68). In particular, they made no sustained attempt to attack Hart until the day after New Hampshire, by which time Hart's impressive win in the Granite State almost completely transformed the character of the race. In the end, it took the Mondale campaign four more months of hard fighting before they finally, narrowly defeated Hart.

In 1996, Dole faced a quite similar predicament. After winning in Iowa (though by a considerably less decisive margin than Mondale), Dole, too, found that victory did little or nothing to help his standing in New Hampshire. Instead, according to all the polls, the momentum went to Pat Buchanan, who finished second in Iowa, and, even more, to Lamar Alexander, who had finished third. In one set of tracking polls, Alexander's support in New Hampshire went from 5% on the day before Iowa to 18% four days after the primary. But here the parallel breaks down, for the Dole campaign knew quite well what had happened to Mondale and, recognizing the peril they faced, did not wait for their opponents' momentum to snowball. The Dole strategists felt that Buchanan was not a long-term threat to win the nomination—but Alexander was. Hence, on the final weekend before the New Hampshire vote, they launched an all-out attack on the former Tennessee governor. And it worked: Alexander's momentum stalled, he finished third in New Hampshire, and he never again was a serious factor in the 1996 Republican nomination race. In the 13 primaries held between New Hampshire and Alexander's withdrawal, he averaged just 9% of the vote (for further details, see Mayer 1997). Instead of having to fight a prolonged battle against a fresh face with a tidal wave of momentum, the Dole campaign stopped Alexander before he ever gained traction.

5. Money helps, but it's definitely not the whole ball game

Though a great deal of attention is always focused on candidate fundraising, the clear thrust of this model is that, unless a candidate also has a strong base of support among ordinary, rank-and-file party voters, a huge warchest will not get a candidate very far. Indeed, according to all three equations in Table 2, the effect of money on primary voting, holding initial poll standings constant, is essentially zero. The same moral emerges, on a more anecdotal level, from a listing of all the candidates who were very successful fundraisers in the year before the election, but then fared dismally once the actual primary voting began: John Connally in 1980, John Glenn in 1984, Pat Robertson in 1988, Phil Gramm in 1996, Steve Forbes in both 1996 and 2000, and even, to some extent, Bill Bradley.

In a number of ways, these statistics probably understate the true role of money in the presidential nomination process. On the one hand, the model does not include (it was not designed to) the role that money might have played in helping a candidate become the frontrunner or remain in that position. On the other side, there is obviously a strong correlation between these two variables, such that frontrunners are generally guaranteed to be at least reasonably successful fundraisers. As noted in the original article, an interesting test case would be to see how a candidate fared who had a large lead in the polls but couldn't raise a decent warchest. But in the races examined here, there is no such candidate.