Bogart, regarding your 2000:
4- there was a serious third party campaign? Surely you don't mean Nader?
10- According to the second article I posted here, "the war in Yugoslavia avert loss of the foriegn/military failure key".
13- comon, Bush is NOT "charismatic or a national hero".
The actual totals for what you gave is 8 false, 5 true (you counted wrong). Changing the 3 I pointed out here, it ends up as 5 false, 8 true, which elects Gore.
The one I'm still not sure about it 2000 is #2. The article in the second post argues that that is the one they need. But if the Democrats did hold key 2 in 2000, leading to a conclusion that Gore should have won, it does not invalidate this theory, because Gore actually did win the popular vote. So the Keys predicted the PV winner, not the EV winner.
Regarding 2004, I think Muon2 explained it pretty well, maybe he cna respond where you differ.
Sorry, I counted wrong. Bush still wins.
As to the third party Key, yes, I mean Nader. Seems pretty clear that he stole enough votes from Gore to put Bush over the top in a couple of states. This would have been enough to elect Gore despite Florida.
I consider Bush holding the "charismatic" Key. While it is largely in the eye of the beholder, I think he scores well enough on this category to give him the Key. Consider he stood on the rubble of 9/11 with Guiliani and all that. One could easily argue that Kerry is not really a "hero" in the conventional sense, while some would point to his being wounded in Vietnam to prove that he is. Even so, I gave this one to Kerry.
Finally, as I said, I perhaps don't understand this fully. I was just putting out a way for the Keys to have predicted 2000 sucessfully based upon one interpretation.
Fritz is correct that the keys only attempt to predict the popular vote winner. Not the margin, and not the EV winner. therfore it focusses on national rather that state effects. It also treats the election as one not only on the sitting president, but the incumbent president's party as a whole.
The Keys are designed with some pretty high thresholds. For instance the 3rd party key requires a third party to get 5% of the total popular vote. For a while in 2000 it looked like Nader might meet that threshold, and then the Keys would have predicted a Bush win, as probably would have happened if Nader did get 5%. No candidate will be close to that this year.
Scandal and Unrest also have very high standards to be met. For instance Iran-Contra did not make the standards for scandal, but Watergate and Clinton's impeachment did. Iraq is at most at the level of Iran-Contra, so it doesn't rise to the high level needed by the keys.
Unrest requires sustained national unrest unresolved during the election year. The social disruption of late 2001 with threats to air travel and mail were both causes of concern and could have triggered it then. However, The concern has abated insofar as it does not pose a great disruption of daily life. A comparable case was the 1972 election,where 1969 and 1970 saw severe unrest over Vietnam, but the protests had greatly subsided by 1972 and the Key was held by the incumbent.
