Will We Have a 'Fair' Election in 2012? The two questions GOP primary voters are trying to answer -- and balance -- are the same two that dominate every primary season: (1) which candidate best represents the one's principles, and (2) which has the best chance of beating the Democrat? But here's a third question that no one seems to be asking: what if it doesn't matter? Ray C. Fair is an economics professor at Yale and the creator of the Presidential Vote Equation .  Professor Fair has been actively using his equation, back-tested on presidential elections going back to 1916 and continuously tweaked, since the election of 1980 to predict which party would win the White House (or to be more precise, whether the Democratic Party would win or lose, meaning that the GOP would lose or win, respectively).  And as the accompanying chart shows, he has done so with an impressive record of accuracy. Of eight elections predicted, Fair's equation got six, or 75 percent, "right."  But note that the only significantly wrong prediction was Bush-Clinton '92, where Fair's equation was off by 10.5 percent -- an election that included a strong third-party candidate, Ross Perot, which conceivably could have "polluted" the predictability of an equation formulated on the assumption of a two-candidate race.  Indeed, the equation did much better on the only other "mispredicted" election, Bush-Gore 2000.  Yes, Fair's equation got that one "wrong," but look at the error: just 0.5 percent.  Given an error that small