How I calculated my predictions

A couple weeks back, I gave the following guesses to Stolen Thunder:

Popular vote: Bush 53% - Kerry 46%
Electoral vote count: Bush 289 – 249

Today, Yale economist Ray Fair made his final calculation for the popular vote using his Presidential Vote Equation. Based on his econometric calculation using inflation and growth rate numbers, Fair estimates that President Bush will win 57.7% of the popular vote. He also notes that his model has had a historical average error of 2.4%. I doubled this potential error and subtracted from his estimate: 57.7-4.8 = 52.9% and rounded to 53%.

For the electoral vote count, I took the Real Clear Politics count of 232 for Bush and added the toss-up states of Florida, Ohio and Wisconsin: 232+27+20+10 = 289.

Discuss amongst yourselves.

Extra: Jayson notes that the largest error in the Fair model was 5.1% in 1992. Factoring in this max error (57.7-5.1%), Bush still wins.