Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry will win a bare majority of the major-party vote in a very close election, according to a new Delphi survey of American political experts conducted by J. Scott Armstrong, professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.

In contrast to traditional polls where people are asked how they will vote, Armstrong employed the Delphi process to ask 15 American political experts to predict how others will vote. Delphi requires responses from only five to 20 experts, versus 500 to 1,000 voters in a political poll.

The median prediction of the experts surveyed was that Kerry would get 50.5 percent of the two-party vote.  They were 95 percent certain that Kerry vote would be at least 48 percent and not more than 54 percent, again using the median scores.  

Armstrong conducted the project with political science professors Alfred Cuzan of the University of West Florida and Randall Jones of the University of Central Oklahoma.  

In the Delphi process, each participant first made an anonymous prediction of the most likely forecast of the vote, along with forecasts of a est caseand orst caseoutcome for one of the candidates, in this case, President Bush, offering reasons for each prediction.  Next, panel members were shown the individual predictions made in the first round and the reasons offered for them, as well as the average and other descriptive statistics for the group.  Panelists were then asked to anonymously revise their estimates in light of these data.

The results of the Delphi study and a list of the panel members are provided at www.pollyvote.com.