SUPERMODEL (via John Resnick):

Fair Elections: An econometric model has Bush all the way. (Donald Luskin, May 14, 2004, National Review)

While polls show Bush and Kerry neck-and-neck, a sophisticated econometric model operated at Yale University — the same kind of model used for simulating the entire U.S. economy — is calling Bush the winner by a wide margin, with almost 58 percent of a two-party vote.

The model is the brainchild of Professor Ray Fair, a fellow at the International Center for Finance at Yale, and one of the world’s most respected authorities on econometrics. He came up with the model in 1978, and published it in a book called Predicting Presidential Elections and Other Things. [...]

Fair thinks the most relevant risk is the potential gap between perception and reality about the economy. Fair says that his model’s prediction of a Bush victory in 1992 was thwarted despite a recovering economy, because public perceptions of recovery lagged the reality.

This time around polling data suggest that the same thing might be happening, with voters’ negative perceptions of the economy strikingly at variance with its true health. But Fair notes that the current economic recovery has already been underway longer than the one in 1992, and the next election is still six months away.

Fair’s model is no political deus ex machina, but it has the virtue of grounding our subjective appraisals of a very emotional matter in solid historical reality. With the beating that George W. Bush is taking every day in the liberal media over real and imagined problems in Iraq, Fair’s model may go a long way toward explaining why Bush’s poll numbers are staying surprisingly strong, and Kerry’s surprisingly weak.