Chapman President Revises His Prediction, Picks Clinton

ORANGE — In December, Chapman University President James Doti crunched some numbers and predicted that President Bush would win reelection by a landslide.

In June he updated his prediction to account for Ross Perot, and reduced Bush’s margin of victory to 9 percentage points.

On Thursday, a sheepish Doti revised his prediction once again: Democratic candidate Bill Clinton will win the presidency by a hair.

“It appears there will be a Clinton victory,” said Doti, who uses a mathematical model largely based on economic indicators to make his forecasts. “I think it will get closer before Tuesday, but not by enough to change the result.”

Doti, a conservative economist who makes annual economic forecasts for Orange County, said two unanticipated factors may explain Clinton’s apparent success. First, he said his earlier models overestimated the positive impact for Bush of the Gulf War. Saddam “Hussein is still around,” Doti said.

Second, the earlier forecasts were based partly on the economy’s sluggish but positive growth rate of about 1.9% this year.

In the latest revision of his model, Doti said, he eliminated the Gulf War factor. And Doti included a new factor: despite a slow but steady quarterly growth rate in the economy, the four-year average is the lowest since Republican Herbert Hoover was in the White House, which led to the election of Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Doti said he still has faith that his original model will be a reliable indicator in future elections. He has applied it to elections dating back to 1912 and came up wrong only once before, in 1960.

“A captain always goes down with his ship,” Doti said in standing by his theory.