Clinton Or Trump? This Candidate Has 87 Percent Chance of Winning Says Professor With 20-Year Accuracy Record


Who will be the next president of the United States–Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican Donald Trump?

Political science professor Helmut Norpoth says that one of them has an 87 percent chance of victory.

Since the February/March timeframe, the Stony Brook University educator who claims to have a long-term accuracy record has been projecting a Trump victory in the general election based on his strong performance in the GOP primaries.

Against 16 other rivals, first-time candidate Donald Trump received 13.4 million votes in the GOP primaries, more than any other Republican candidate in history.

Dr. Norpoth, who claims to be five for five, also considers opinion polls untrustworthy. The current Real Clear Politics average gives Hillary Clinton about a six-percent lead over Trump on a national basis, although the presidency is won on a state-by-state basis in a contest for at least 270 electoral votes.

The professor’s statistical modeling has supposedly predicted each presidential election accurately based on popular vote since 1912 (with the exception of Kennedy-Nixon in 1960) with a 96.1 percent accuracy.

On his Primary Model website, Prof. Norpoth summarizes his approach to presidential predictions.

“In a match-up between the Republican primary winner and each of the Democratic contenders, Donald Trump is predicted to defeat Hillary Clinton by 52.5% to 47.5% of the two-party vote. For the record, the PRIMARY MODEL, with slight modifications, has correctly predicted the winner of the popular vote in all five presidential elections since it was introduced in 1996. In recent elections the forecast has been issued as early as January of the election year. Presidential elections going back as far as 1912 are used to estimate the weight of primary performance.”

The educator has also maintained that it is very difficult for the same political party to hold the White House for three consecutive terms. In this context, there is even more reason for the electoral pendulum to swing from Democrat to Republican.

Writing in The Hill last week, Helmut Norpoth labeled presidential polls as “bunk” based on how they’ve failed in past elections.

“To start with something basic, opinion polls are really about ‘opinions,’ not actions. At their best, they can tell us how people feel about political issues and personalities. Do voters, for instance, like or dislike candidates such as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump? Yet having an opinion and acting on it are two different things. Barely 6 in 10 voting-age American citizens turn out for presidential elections…So hold off on trusting poll-driven proclamations of a Clinton victory just yet. Voters have a way of always getting the last word.”

Beware of exit polls on Election Day, too, he suggested, because of all the people who will opt out of revealing their vote to a stranger outside a voting precinct.

Norpoth evidently excludes from consideration the impact of the highly publicized controversies Trump has found recently himself in engulfed in.

The respected IBD/TPPP poll (the most accurate survey in 2012) released yesterday before the third and final nationally televised presidential debate shows Trump with a one-point lead. Rasmussen’s pre-debate poll published today gives the New York real estate mogul and first-time candidate a three-point edge. Both of these polls include Jill Stein and Gary Johnson, from the Green Party and Libertarians respectively, in the mix.

Some pro-Trump websites argue that pollsters are including too many Democrats in their sample in order to get a desired result favorable to Clinton.

It’s also unclear if these prognosticators or pollsters take potential voter fraud into consideration when making their calculations. Controversial muckraker James O’ Keefe and his Project Veritas crew released a video earlier this week that has achieved about three million hits on YouTube so far, that allegedly shows Democratic operatives boasting about voter fraud.

In response to the post-debate media hoopla about Trump’s unwillingness to accept, in advance, the election results, the former Celebrity Apprentice host trolled reporters today during a campaign rally in Ohio.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I want to make a major announcement today. I would like to promise and pledge to all of my voters and supporters and to all of the people of the United States that I will total accept the results of this great and historical presidential election if I win.”

Do you think that the current opinion polls are an accurate reflection of who will win, Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, on Election Day 2016?

[Featured Image by John Locher/AP Images]

Added: In an appearance on Fox & Friends, Dr. Helmut Norpoth reaffirms his prediction that Donald Trump is the next U.S. president.

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