Last week we presented the claim by seven number-crunching political scientists that the 2000 presidential election is already over. All of them predicted that Al Gore will be elected in November. But what is really interesting about their claim is not their prediction of the outcome. After all, realistically there are only two choices, Gore or Bush, and at the moment many seasoned political observers, who couldn't read a "complex mathematical formula" to save their lives, are giving the nod to Gore.No, what is most significant about the claim of these political scientists is their description of what's really going on, not only in this presidential campaign but in presidential campaigns generally. All the back and forth of the campaign as reported by the media every day is in fact, these political scientists inform us, an elaborate exercise in self-deception, a kind of mass delusion. The outcome of the election has already been determined "before the official campaign gets under way," Emory University's Alan Abramowitz explains.Not that these political scientists are against official campaigns and all the hoopla that comes with them: the staking out of positions, the charges and counter-charges, the whole show. No, as Robert Kaiser reports in the Washington Post, "the mathematical forecasters all agree that campaigns matter, but not in the way politicians and political reporters often believe"—nor the way voters themselves believe.For instance, Kaiser writes, James Campbell of the University of Buffalo and Thomas Holbrook of the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee "argue that the campaign's real importance is in mobilizing partisans and reminding voters of the issues and of the state of affairs in the country." So the ...