Econometrics indicate a Bush victory

NYTimes: Questions for Ray C. Fair: Bush Landslide (in Theory)!

As a professor of economics at Yale, you are known for creating an econometric equation that has predicted presidential elections with relative accuracy.

My latest prediction shows that Bush will receive 57.5 percent of the two-party votes.

The polls are suggesting a much closer race.

Polls are notoriously flaky this far ahead of the election, and there is a limit to how much you want to trust polls.

Why should we trust your equation, which seems unusually reductive?

It has done well historically. The average mistake of the equation is about 2.5 percentage points.

The really funny part of this interview is how the interviewer practically pleads with Fair to soften or change or qualify his prediction to boost the prospects for a desired result: a Kerry victory. Of course, that completely misses the point of objective scholarship -- or for that matter, objective journalism.

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