New Election Prediction: Clinton Wins By More Than Obama In 2012, Former GOP Strategist Predicts — But Nate Silver Disagrees

As the 2016 Presidential campaign moved into its final day, a Hillary Clinton victory over Donald Trump prediction came in from an unexpected source — the man who helped guide then-President George W. Bush to a second term by defeating Democratic candidate John Kerry in 2004. That man is political strategist Matthew Dowd, 55, who now calls himself a “proud independent,” but who built his career as a behind-the-scenes political kingmaker guiding Republicans to power.

Now an ABC News political commentator, Dowd appeared on the This Week program on Sunday where he gave Clinton a 95 percent chance of winning the November 8 election.

“I think she’s going to have a higher margin than Barack Obama did in 2012. She’s going to win by more than 5 million votes. She’s going to win a higher percentage. And itnerestingly she’s going to have amore diverse coalition than Barack Obama even did when you take the final vote into consideration. Every piece of data points in that direction.”

Watch Dowd issue his startling prediction in the video below.

Of course, at least in terms of her percentage odds of victory, Dowd’s prediction of a Clinton triumph falls in line with most of the major statistically based election forecasters, with Huffington Post Pollster.com, and Princeton Election Consortium both giving Clinton greater than a 98 percent chance of becoming the country’s 45th — and first female — president.

The New York Times Upshot and Benchmark Politics forecasts both put Clinton’s chances at 85 or 86 percent.

But one election forecaster, perhaps the best known of them all — Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight — took issue with not just Dowd’s prediction, but any prediction that placed Clinton’s chances in the high 90 percent range.

Watch Silver speak on the same edition of ABC’s This Week, by clicking on the video that follows.

In fact, differing from Dowd, Silver sees Clinton as holding a weaker position than Obama in 2012, in the president’s race against Republican challenger and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney.

“Clinton is a lot weaker in the Midwest where four years ago President Obama was leading in Ohio by four points. Clinton’s probably a couple of points behind there. Iowa, maybe the best poll in the country, the Des Moines Register Poll showed her down seven points in Iowa, a state she’ll probably lose. So the demographics for Clinton don’t actually work as well when you underperform among white noncollege voters. That’s a good group.”

Silver also said that the high number of undecided voters in the 2016 election adds a far higher degree of uncertainty to Clinton’s chances than Obama had to deal with four years earlier.

“We see lots of polls that show numbers like Clinton 44 percent, Trump 40 percent. If you only have 44 percent of the vote that means you’re vulnerable if most of the undecideds break in a certain way whereas four years ago it was like Obama 49, Romney 46,” he said.

“So in that sense both candidates still need a good turnout on election day and still have their work cut out for them.”

Silver’s FiveThirtyEight forecast gives Clinton barely more than a 64 percent chance of victory, as of late Sunday, November 6. That’s not even a full two-to-one chance.

MORE ELECTION COVERAGE FROM THE INQUISITR:
2016 Election Predictions: It’s Clinton! Forecasts Agree As Campaign Enters Final 48 Hours
2016 Presidential Polls: Clinton Tops 6 Of 9 New Polls With 4 Days To Go Before Election Day
Presidential Polls 2016: Trump Vs. Clinton Enters Home Stretch With Democrat Holding Solid Lead
2016 Presidential Election Predictions: Clinton Tops Trump — Top Election Forecasters Call The Race
2016 Election Predictions: Presidential Race To Be A Landslide Victory — But Not For Donald Trump

Voting gets underway on Tuesday morning, November 8, and ends with the final polls closing on the west coast at around 8:30 p.m. Pacific Time. Sometime soon after that time, the country will know for sure whose predictions were correct, and which forecasters need to go back to the drawing board.

[Featured Image By Justin Sullivan/Getty Images]