IT appears that Hillary Clinton is going to suspend her presidential campaign this weekend, at the urging of Democratic Party leaders and superdelegates. Before that happens, Mrs. Clinton and the superdelegates might want to know this: if the general election were held today, Barack Obama would lose to John McCain, while Mr. McCain would lose to Mrs. Clinton.

This conclusion comes not from wishful thinking but from a new method of analysis on the statistics of polls that has been accepted for publication in the journal Mathematical and Computer Modeling. The authors, J. Richard Gott III, a professor at Princeton, and Wes Colley, a researcher at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, are not political scientists. They are astrophysicists. And one of the tasks of scientists is to clarify the apparent complexity of the universe by using the language of mathematics.

Here’s what they discovered: in swing states, the median result of all the polls conducted in the weeks prior to an election is an especially effective predictor of which candidate will win that election  even in states where the polls consistently fall within the margin of error.

This method provides a far more accurate assessment of public opinion than most people’s politically informed commentary. In the 2004 presidential election between John Kerry and George W. Bush, many political analysts said the race was too close to call. But when Professor Gott and Dr. Colley applied the median method in 2004, they correctly predicted the winner in 49 states, missing only Hawaii.