So, what will Tipper wear to the inauguration ball? Is Richard Holbrooke going to become secretary of state at last? What are Al Gore's chances of winning a second term in 2004? Who on earth will the Republicans find to challenge him after George W Bush's defeat?

If you think that questions of this kind are a bit premature, then seven American academics can show you that they are not. Al Gore will win the US presidential election on November 7, they say, by a narrow but clear majority. Nothing that happens between now and election day is likely to affect the outcome at all.

The seven academics all presented papers yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Washington. All of them based their findings on separate mathematical models which they have devised for predicting the results of past US elections.

Several of their formulas have repeatedly proved to be extremely accurate. In July 1996, Michael Lewis-Beck of the University of Iowa used his model to predict that Bill Clinton would win a second term, capturing 54.8% of the two-party vote. Four months later, Clinton defeated Bob Dole, taking 54.7%. Pretty good, eh?

This year, Lewis-Beck says that Gore will win even more handsomely. Gore will get 56.2% of the vote on November 7, he says. "It's not even going to be close," Lewis-Beck told the Washington Post as long ago as May.

Not all of the academics agree on the precise numbers. But they all agree about who is going to win. Gore, with 53.2%, says Alan Abramowitz of Emory University. Gore, with 55%, says Christopher Wlezien of the University of Houston. Gore with 52.8%, according to James Campbell of the University of Buffalo.

The numbers range from 52.3% to 60.3%, but the name in the winner's column is always the same: Al Gore.

The forecasters' models differ in various ways. But they are all seek to integrate the public opinion polls with reported data on the strength and weakness of the economy and with poll findings on the public's sense of its own wellbeing.

And they all agree that the two crucial guides to the outcome of the election are the incumbent president's job satisfaction ratings and the public's sense of economic confidence compared with past years.

That is why the news is so good for Gore. Bill Clinton's job approval ratings in mid-August were 60% positive against 38% negative - almost exactly where they have been for the past four years.

And polls which track Americans' economic confidence are registering record numbers, with 74% rating US economic conditions as excellent or good, 21% rating them fair and just 4% saying they are poor.

Nothing is set in stone, of course, and the academic forecasters are all at pains to say that things could change over the next two months, especially if something unforeseen on Wall Street throws a spanner in the works. The margins of victory which are being predicted for Gore now are slightly narrower than the margins which the same models were suggesting in the spring (when the opinion polls were dramatically in Bush's favour).

Even so, the obvious intellectual attraction of the political scientists' findings is that they tally with what so much American common sense suggests - that in such good economic times, Gore ought to beat Bush.

Larry Bartels of Princeton University says the prediction models are "a valuable antidote to the press's overwhelming focus on candidates' personalities, campaign tactics and other campaign-specific factors which are much more interesting to write about but much less important to the outcome of the election."

Thomas Holbrook of the University of Wisconsin says that the campaign's real importance is not in swaying voters one way or the other, but in mobilising voters to vote the way they normally do anyway.

All the initial signs since this year's party conventions are that this is precisely what is happening - and that Gore is moving into a small but significant lead over Bush.

If the academics are right in November, then their findings leave a sobering thought. No word that is uttered, no dollar that is spent, and no promise that is made over the next two months is likely to make any significant difference to anything.

Which leaves us with only one important question. What will Tipper wear to the ball?