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Well when the election is that close, it's basically a coin flip, so no matter what happened it could be spun as a win. If the press hadn't called Florida for Gore in record time while people were still voting, who knows, maybe Bush would have won the popular vote.

The 13 keys predicted a Gore victory, which didn't happen. The best you could argue for would be a tie, but that's not what it predicted.

My problem with it is it seems to be completely arbitrary. How do you define these things? Who would call these 4 years a foreign/military failure? That's absurd. So was the economy thing. Who decides what "charasmastic" means. The keys don't have any sort of ground in something measureable or objective. Who gets to decide if a key has failed or not?

That being said, I'm glad the keys are boding well for Bush, and would agree that there's something to it given the accuracy. But I wonder if these keys predicted the results ahead of time, of if it's just a matter of looking for trends after the fact. Then if you look at enough data, you can find a pattern for anything. For example, the amount of snowfall in Peru has accurately predicted every election since 1910.

Or here's one. If you look at enough criteria, you might be able to spin a good economy into a bad one but creating a "misery index".

But I wonder if these keys predicted the results ahead of time, of if it's just a matter of looking for trends after the fact. Then if you look at enough data, you can find a pattern for anything. For example, the amount of snowfall in Peru has accurately predicted every election since 1910.

A point well taken. The 13 Keys were developed in 1981. They retrospectively predicted every presidential election from 1860 to 1980, and prospectively predicted the elections from 1984 to 1996, with a near-miss for 2000.

I agree that a lot of the criteria are subjective, but I don't think that's avoidable. This seems like a pretty good measure, based on its track record -- and the analogy to snowfall in Peru is not really on point, since there's no plausible causal link between snowfall in Peru and American presidential elections, but it is plausible to think that the factors listed in the 13 Keys would have an impact on the presidential election.

I think rather than slamming the 13 Keys, it is more interesing to look at why they failed in 2000, and see if it would be a good idea to tweak them. For that, we really need more data, and presumably the 2004 election will provide us with that. If 2004 results in another failure, we should be very skeptical of the formula; if it is a success, then we might conclude that the formula remains a highly accurate, but not a perfect, predictor.