I recently checked out Ray Fair's Web page to see what the noted Yale economist was now saying about the presidential election. As I wrote back in February, Fair has created an economics-based forecasting model that has an uncanny track record at predicting election outcomes. His model—which, specifically, predicts the share of the two-party vote that the candidate from the incumbent party will win—mainly takes into account the economy's performance over the 15 quarters before an election. In six presidential elections, the model has been as close as 0.2 percentage points (in 1980) to the actual results and never off by more than 1.9 points (in 1988). So what is Fair predicting now? Even though all the polls say Bush vs. Kerry looks like a dead heat, Fair's model, which he updated on April 29, gives a prediction of 58.74 percent of the two-party vote for Bush rather than 58.68 percent as predicted back in February. "The main message that the equation has been making from the beginning is thus not changed, namely that President Bush is predicted to win by a sizable margin," he writes.

# posted by James M. Pethokoukis at 5:00 PM EST
Return to Next News
Go to the archive