Professor With History of Correctly Predicting Election Says Trump Will Win
Brian Freeman
Despite the overwhelming consensus of pollsters and pundits that Democratic contender Hillary Clinton will win the election, one academic with a history of correctly predicting the past five presidential elections insisted to Fox News that Donald Trump will triumph Nov. 8.
Stony Brook University Professor Helmut Norpoth said he uses two models for his prediction, the first of which is the Primary Model, as "it usually turns out the candidate who does better in his party's primaries or her party's primaries beats the other guy who does less well."
In his website, Primary Model, Norpoth explains he used the primary races in South Carolina and New Hampshire, where Trump won and performed better than Clinton did in the Democratic race, because the results in the early primaries are the best indicators for the general election.
The second model, he explains, is called the Swing of the Pendulum, which he told "Fox & Friends" program "is the tendency after two terms of a White House party being in office that there is a change . . . which gives a prediction that Republicans are favored this year."
Norpoth is so convinced by his models he has backed up his prediction by buying shares in Trump in the Iowa Electronic Markets.
However, not all are convinced by his methods. As pointed out in Quora, the current social and economic context is quite different from earlier elections, and it is usually unwise to rely only on one predictive model, as opposed to synthesizing results from several different models.