THE VOTE IS IN?:

Change in Consumer Confidence and Thus the Presidency (DANIEL AKST, 12/01/03, NY Times)

The Conference Board, a business research group, started conducting regular surveys of consumer confidence in the late 1960's, and since then, the data are clear: when the board's Consumer Confidence Index in the September before a presidential election is at 100 or above, the incumbent party wins the popular vote. That held true for Al Gore in 2000, even though he lost to George W. Bush in the Electoral College vote. The only year the connection did not hold up was in 1968, when the confidence level, then tallied bimonthly, exceeded 100 in both August and October, and Richard M. Nixon defeated the candidate of the incumbent party, Hubert H. Humphrey.

For those who cannot wait until next fall's Conference Board figures for a sense of who will win the presidential election, there is an even more intriguing metric. [...]

When the board surveys consumers, it measures both their perception of how things are and their expectations for the future. Determine which is higher, and you get some sense of how optimistic people are. In 1970, for instance, the "present" score was 61.8 in the survey closest to the midterm elections, but expectations were measured at 97.5. In that case, the future looked brighter than the present by 35.7 points, and two years later Nixon was re-elected.

In 1978, however, expectations stood at 82.4, while the present weighed in at 117.7. The difference, a negative 35.3, implied substantial pessimism and was followed two years later by Ronald Reagan's defeat of Jimmy Carter. In 1998, dizzyingly high levels of consumer confidence swamped relatively less high expectations, and in 2000 the Democrats lost the White House.

The exception was the re-election of President Clinton in 1996. Two years earlier, expectations minus current confidence was slightly negative. As to the current president, the midterm figures, from November last year, suggest he will win next year.