In his "Strategies" column in The New York Times, Jeff Sommer is touting how things are looking up for Barack Obama.
Try this: Based on the facts at hand right now, Mr. Obama is likely to win the 2012 election in a landslide. That, at least, is the prediction of Ray C. Fair, a Yale economist and an expert on econometrics and on the relationship of economics and politics.
What’s the basis of this forecast? In a nutshell: “It’s the economy, stupid.”
That’s the smart-alecky slogan that James Carville, the Democratic strategist, used to focus the 1992 presidential election campaign and propel Bill Clinton to victory. But after many years of study, Professor Fair has found that it embodies a certain truth: The state of the economy — which includes the wealth effect produced by rising and falling asset prices — has a dominant influence on national elections.
While updating his 2002 book, “Predicting Presidential Elections and Other Things,” he has calculated his first prediction for the next national election and posted it on his Yale Web site. He says the likely outcome is an Obama victory, regardless of whom he runs against. “If my model’s right, it couldn’t look better for Obama,” he said.
There's one problem with this optimism. Ray Fair hasn't always been right with his predictive model. There could be a political disconnect between economic growth and the president:
Fair believes that a similar disconnect was the culprit the last time his formula erred. In 1992, it predicted that Bush's father would win re-election. He didn't.
Fair sensed a landslide in 2004, but George W. Bush won by a thinner margin that that.
