During an AERA symposium, Douglas Mitchell (1988) charged dissatisfaction theory to live up to the expectations of it. He suggested that it was perhaps time to abandon the theory because it had not been able to predict the political upheavals it described. Coming from one who has contributed significantly to the theory, and is probably the one who labeled it, his suggestion that it should perhaps be abandoned because of its failure to provide reliable prediction indeed deserves serious consideration. This article deals with that assertion in two ways. First, it reports the first instance of actually predicting school board member incumbent defeat. Second, it suggests why prediction, in its absolute statistical sense, is not the only goal or perhaps even an achievable expectation for such a social/political theory.
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