
President Donald J. Trump gestures with a fist-pump as he disembarks Air Force One at Wilkes-Barre Scranton International Airport in Avoca, Pa., Thursday, August 20, 2020, and Is greeted by guests and supporters. (Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour)
At The American Spectator, David Catron details the model used by Professor Helmut Norpoth to predict that Donald Trump will trounce Joe Biden in November. He writes (abridged):
Most political prognosticators delay their final predictions for a presidential race until the morning of Election Day. In 2016, for example, Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight and Nate Cohn of the New York Times released their final projections during the wee hours of November 8. One forecaster, however, routinely publishes his predictions six months in advance. Professor Helmut Norpoth of Stony Brook University in New York issued his last word on the Trump–Clinton contest 246 days before the voters went to the polls. In March 2016, Norpoth confidently predicted that Donald Trump would be elected president..
Professor Norpoth just as confidently predicts that Trump will trounce Joe Biden in November. Specifically, he gives the president a 91 percent chance of winning the election with an unambiguous 362-176 Electoral College projections. His model has correctly predicted five of the last six presidential elections, and projected the correct result in all but two of the last 27 contests when pre-election data were fed into his “Primary model.”
This model ignores the polls, which Norpoth believes are no longer representative of the electorate, and does not attempt to calculate the political effect of transient events like economic fluctuations or natural disasters. Instead, it is designed around long-term electoral cycles and early primary results of particular contests under scrutiny. There is a remarkably large amount of historical data for Norpoth to draw from in building and refining his model. Reliable information regarding electoral cycles is available as far back as 1828, and reliable data on primary performances by individual presidential candidates goes back to 1912.
History is on Norpoth’s side. His “Primary model” has been right 25 of 27 times, and it predicts that, in 2020, President Trump will defeat Joe Biden 362-176 in the Electoral College.
David Catron is a recovering health care consultant and frequent contributor to The American Spectator.
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