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A college professor who has accurately predicted outcomes of the past five elections is doubling down on his claim that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump will be victorious on Nov. 8 — even as polls consistently show Trump trailing Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.
Helmut Norpoth, a political science professor at Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, New York, has devised what he calls “The Primary Model,” a two-prong approach to predicting the outcomes of presidential campaigns.
The current model predicts that Trump has an 87 percent to 99 percent chance of winning, with Norpoth explaining his methodology during an appearance on Fox News over the weekend.
“I take into account primary elections, real elections — how the candidates are performing, and I can track primaries for about 100 years, since 1912,” he said. “It usually turns out that the candidate who does better in his party’s primaries or her party’s primaries beats the other guy who does less well.”
In exploring early primaries in New Hampshire and South Carolina, Norpoth noted that Trump did better than Clinton, yielding the first sign that he said could spell electoral victory for the Republican businessman.
The second predictive method involves what the professor calls the “swing of the pendulum” — the notion that when one party has been in power for two terms a change of the political guard tends to unfold.
“The tendency after, let’s say two terms of the White House party being in office, there is a change,” Norpoth said.
And based on data over the past 200 years, he said it “gives a prediction that Republicans are favored this year.” Read more about the professor’s predictive analysis here.
Watch Norpoth explain why he’s not backing away from his claims of a Trump victory below:
On a more comical note, there’s another trend that some say has accurately predicted election results over the past three decades: the sale of Halloween masks.
And this year it appears Trump masks are selling faster than Clinton masks, leading some to point to a 36-year history of presidential-themed costumes correctly indicating electoral victories, the Daily Mail reported.
While Trump is trouncing Clinton in mask sales, some note that this election has been so heated and contentious that the Halloween dynamic might be quite different from the past. Rather than dressing up as a form of flattery, customers might be buying masks to mock the candidates — something that could toss the purported “predictive” measure on its head.
With these measures aside, Clinton has consistently been topping Trump in scientific polling, with the Real Clear Politics average standing at 48.3 percent for Clinton and 43.2 percent for Trump as of Tuesday morning.
Other models say there’s at least an 80 percent chance that Clinton will win the presidency, though only time will tell.
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