If history is any guide, Washington and Lee University's Mock Democratic Convention next week probably will pick the Democratic Party's presidential and vice presidential candidates, three days before the Super Tuesday primaries and long before the real Democratic convention in July.

The school's mock conventions -- with parades through downtown Lexington, Va., party platform fights, roll call votes, and intense debating and vote trading by 1,600 student delegates -- have correctly chosen the nominees 14 out of 19 times since they began in 1908.

So accurate are these simulated conventions of the party not in the White House that every four years in March, politicians travel to the school to speak to the gatherings.

And winners traditionally call to thank the mock delegates. When Ronald Reagan won the Mock Republican Convention in 1980, he phoned and jokingly asked if their record of choosing correctly meant he didn't have to campaign anymore.

Former president Harry S. Truman, keynote speaker at the 1960 Mock Democratic Convention, said: "This is a real convention, and I ought to know because I've been looking at them since 1912."

Washington and Lee, founded in 1749 and the nation's sixth-oldest institution of higher learning, launched the mock conventions after Democrat William Jennings Bryan spoke at the school in 1908 early in his campaign for president. Oberlin College in Ohio has had a mock convention since the Civil War era, but Washington and Lee students say their gathering, "for consistent accuracy and eye-filling opulence, simply has no peer."

The first Washington and Lee mock convention got off to a rowdy start when delegates supporting Bryan and Minnesota Gov. John A. Johnson got into a fistfight and Johnson supporters walked out. Bryan was nominated by the delegates who remained, and by the real Democratic convention six weeks later.

The only mock convention mistake in the last 42 years came in 1972. After deadlocking over Sen. George McGovern (D-S.D.) and former vice president Hubert H. Humphrey, the delegates chose Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.).

This year, New York Gov. Mario Cuomo will give the keynote address. Also scheduled to speak are former Massachusetts governor Michael S. Dukakis and former House speaker Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill.

One of this convention's three chairmen, John Donaldson, a senior from Baltimore, said the success comes from six months of work by virtually every student at the school. They read newspapers and polls, and call political science professors and party leaders in all the states.

"It all boils down to the research," Donaldson said. "By this time we have a pretty good idea how each state will vote," and so far the research has predicted exactly what is happening, with former senator Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts and Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton in the lead.

Donaldson would not make a prediction, but he said he expected "Clinton's campaign to pick up steam" by mock convention time.