WASHINGTON -- See if this doesn't ring a bell as a novel way of describing the atmosphere as the presidential campaign heads down the stretch starting today:
The futures market in the Midwest that politics-crazed tea leaf readers love to follow was delightfully confusing as the Labor Day weekend began.
Not the one for pork bellies, the one for presidents.
A single ''contract'' on the next American presidency, paying a dollar on the popular vote victor, was available for about 49.9 cents assuming it's a Republican, and 49.5 cents for a Democrat. It doesn't get any closer than that, unless it's the 50.1 cents for each at which the market closed Thursday at midnight. If that sounds like a market forecast of the popular vote, that's because it basically is.
Just three weeks ago, the Republican contract was getting much more bidding attention. As of Aug. 17, the day of Al Gore's acceptance speech, the spread was 57-44 in the Republican direction. But then it began switching steadily in the weeks that followed, producing the current muddle.
The faculty at the University of Iowa's business school has been running this market for years, drawing a useful basis for election forecasting. People put real money (up to a $500 limit) on the line, and not just casually guess, and the market is dynamic, updated every 15 minutes.
A futures market is one thing. A resort to the operation of the economy to divine political trends seems more fanciful.
But the fact is that the economy, measured the right way, is even more reliable as a guide to voting behavior in the presidential elections. This is unsettling, if only because economic determinism is not exactly an apple pie concept in this country. Most of us prefer campaigns as narratives of a contest between two individuals that usually seesaws back and forth in a contest where opinion polls keep score. In this view, the campaign in all of its grandeur and baloney is the key.
But there is another way of looking at presidential campaigns and that's as referendums on the condition of the country. Oriented more toward the crucial quarter of the electorate that is capable of voting for either candidate, the issue assumes that the two nominees are basically capable fellows and frames the question as whether the in party should stay or go.
Here is where political economists can help. Defined the right way, usually by some measurement of personal economic health as opposed to aggregate production or employment levels, the track record for numerous models that have evolved in recent decades is eerily accurate - as if the campaign itself was inconsequential.
And right now, the economy-based models are coming up Al Gore over George W. Bush.
These models have been correct through many a campaign that appeared dead even on Labor Day, but there is widespread uneasiness about them this year for reasons that go much deeper than Bush's long domination of the polls until quite recently.
Several major Bush campaign figures, most notably adviser and pollster Fred Steeper, assert that prosperity is such an ingrained reality this year that it has lost the political pull it exerted when the business cycle was more real to people. They point to huge disparities between the large majorities who think the country is headed in the right direction, who give President Clinton high job approval marks, and the comparable majorities who think the country's moral climate stinks and give Clinton low personal approval numbers. The Bush people also believe the prosperous economy has freed voters to emphasize other concerns - hence the campaign's message of ''restoring honor and dignity to the White House'' and on improving education.
But the models don't go away. A state economy specialist firm called Dismal Scientist has a reliable model that forecasts the Electoral College. Its emphasis is on the performance of a basic measure of the standard of living - inflation-adjusted changes in personal income in per capita terms - with weights for inflation, recent stock market performance and an allowance for incumbency. Its latest projection is 356-182 for Gore, based on 52.7 percent of the two-party vote total.
Another one, by Sweden-based professor Douglas Hibbs further adjusts the personal income data for federal taxes and looks at the record throughout the current presidential term. Gore's vote share is at roughly 55 percent.
Even those models that try to make allowances for a vague desire for change by factoring in the duration of the in party's lack of an incumbent on the ballot are still coming up for Gore because the economy's performance this year keeps strengthening beyond expectations.
This week Bush went negative in his campaign. Perhaps it reflected his campaign's belief that people want better leadership. But perhaps it also reflected his campaign's discovery that the fundamentals are beginning to apply.
Thomas Oliphant is a Globe columnist.
