2016 Election Predictions: It’s Clinton! Forecasts Agree As Campaign Enters Final 48 Hours

Nearly 18 months after Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy for president and 14 months after Donald Trump announced his, the 2016 presidential election campaign now has fewer than 48 hours remaining before voters go to the polls on Tuesday. And with little time left for either candidate to change any voter’s mind, the top statistically-based election predictions agree: the most likely winner and next president of the United States will be the former First Lady, New York Senator and U.S. Secretary of State — Hillary Clinton.

But not all of the election forecasters are in sync when to comes to the degree of certainty in their predictions of a Clinton victory. In fact, among the the five top election prediction models, Clinton’s chances range from a low of 65.2 percent — giving Trump better than a one-in-three chance of beating Clinton — to a high of 99 percent, which would be for all intents and purposes a guaranteed Clinton win.

Here’s how the top election forecasters see the probability of a Clinton victory on November 8.

FIVE THIRTY EIGHT/NATE SILVER: The most famous election prediction site, founded by former Baseball Prospectus statistician Nate Silver, has also been the most controversial in 2016 because Silver’s forecasting model has continually given Trump a greater chance of victory than any other forecaster’s site.

Though the FiveThirtyEight.com percentages change throughout each day as new polls are released, as of early on Sunday, November 6, Silver’s “polls-plus” forecast — which is based on polling data supplemented by economic and historical factors — gave Clinton a 65.2 percent chance of victory. Trump had a 34.7 percent chance to become president.

Why has Silver and his FiveThirtyEight.com statistical model been far more generous to Trump than any other election prediction formula? According to an article Saturday in The Huffington Post — which runs its own, competing forecast — Sliver has been “unskewing” the polls in Trump’s favor.

“Silver is changing the results of polls to fit where he thinks the polls truly are, rather than simply entering the poll numbers into his model and crunching them,” wrote HuffPo Washington Bureau Chief Ryan Grim. “Silver calls this unskewing a ‘trend line adjustment.’ He compares a poll to previous polls conducted by the same polling firm, makes a series of assumptions, runs a regression analysis, and gets a new poll number. That’s the number he sticks in his model ? not the original number. He may end up being right, but he’s just guessing.”

Grim’s article produced an angry response from Silver on the FiveThirtyEight.com election guru’s Twitter feed — with Silver slamming the HuffPo article as “f*****g idiotic and irresponsible,” claiming that his model is “based on evidence,” while many of his competitors were “people — like Ryan Grim — [who] don’t actually give a s**t about evidence and proof.”

The philosophy behind 538 is: Prove it. Doesn't mean we can't be wrong (we're wrong all the time). But prove it. Don't be lazy.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016

And especially don't be lazy when your untested assumptions happen to validate your partisan beliefs.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016

Another article attacking Silver’s model, written by Arum Gupta, appeared Saturday on the site Raw Story. In that piece, Gupta explained what he called Silver’s overestimation of Trump’s chances as a result of two factors, ignored by FiveThirtyEight.com: early voting — which has apparently favored Clinton by a significant margin so far — and the efficiency of each candidate’s “get out the vote” efforts, another area where Clinton has a solid advantage.

BENCHMARK POLITICS: Founded and run primarily by statistician Anthony Reed of Louisiana State University, Benchmark Politics bases its forecast on “county-level demographic” statistics in addition to polling and economic data. Using that combination of information, Reed, as of November 6, sees Clinton with an 85 percent chance of victory on Tuesday.

Clinton 85% likely to win as we near election day. Early voting reports are lining up well with our model. https://t.co/VC7dyQwRZN pic.twitter.com/1keFS1WsnV

— Benchmark Politics (@benchmarkpol) November 4, 2016

Trump gets a 15 percent shot at winning, according to Benchmark Politics calculations. In the Electoral College, Benchmark predicts that Clinton will win 322 votes — 52 more than required to win the White House – leaving Trump with 216.

NEW YORK TIMES UPSHOT: On Sunday, New York Times polling experts Josh Katz and Nate Cohn’s model agrees closely with the Benchmark Politics prediction, assigning Clinton an 84 percent chance of victory to 16 percent for Trump.

Trump's challenge: figure out how to crack Clinton's advantage in these states https://t.co/uwl5HQ5gEx pic.twitter.com/W8uXaYa3VB

— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) November 5, 2016

“A victory by Mr. Trump remains possible: Mrs. Clinton’s chance of losing is about the same as the probability that an N.F.L. kicker misses a 38-yard field goal,” Katz wrote on Sunday.

HUFFINGTON POST POLLSTER.COM: One of the most optimistic forecasters when it comes to predicting a Clinton victory, the Huffington Post site Pollster.com runs millions of computer-simulated elections to come up with its percentage chance of victory, based on the polling data in the Pollster.com model.

“We simulated a Nov. 8 election 10 million times using our state-by-state averages,” Pollster.com wrote on Sunday. “In 9.8 million simulations, Hillary Clinton ended up with at least 270 electoral votes. Therefore, we say Clinton has a 98.4 percent chance of becoming president.”

Trump ended up with a mere 1.6 percent chance of winning the presidency in the 10 million simulated elections run by Pollster.com. In the scenario that came up most frequently in the computer simulations —more than 540,000 times — Clinton won 340 electoral votes to 198 for Trump.

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PRINCETON ELECTION CONSORTIUM: Founded by Princeton University data scientist Sam Wang, the Princeton Election Consortium has been running its election forecasting model since 2004, longer than any of the other statistically-based sites.

And no forecaster is more certain of a Hillary Clinton victory on Tuesday than Wang, whose model sees Clinton as a lock, with a greater than 99 percent chance of winning the presidential election on Tuesday — another prediction that left FiveThirtyEight‘s Silver aggravated.

“There’s a reasonable range of disagreement,” Silver wrote on his Twitter feed. “But a model showing Clinton at 98% or 99% is not defensible based on the empirical evidence.”

But, as noted by Vox.com politics writer Andrew Prokop, “We’ll never really know whether a particular forecast was correct or incorrect, since they’re all probabilistic, and they all suggest a Clinton win is the most likely outcome.”

In other words, there will be only one election, so the only percentages than mean anything for each candidate’s chances of winning are 100 percent — and zero.

[Featured Image By Justin Sullivan/Getty Images]