In addition to his recent Intrade.com prediction model, economics professor Ray Fair has published a well-known prediction model for presidential elections based solely on quarterly economic indicators. Unlike the Intrade model, which predicts the number of electoral votes a candidate receives, the economic indicator model forecasts the popular vote share the presidential nominee of each party will receive in the next election. For Tuesday’s election, each forecast since the initial prediction on Nov. 1, 2006, showed a Democratic victory regardless of the candidate. The economic indicator model’s final quarterly prediction on Oct. 30 predicted Sen. Barack Obama would receive 51.9 percent of the popular vote, while Sen. John McCain would receive 48.1 percent; on Tuesday, the model was nearly spot-on, as Obama received 52.4 percent of the vote to McCain’s 46.3 percent. According to Fair, the model’s final error of 1.1 percent lay well within its standard margin of error of 2.5 percent.