by Daniel Payne
A professor of political science whose controversial election model has correctly called five of the last six U.S. presidential elections says President Trump will win reelection in 2020 in a “landslide.”
Helmut Norpoth, who teaches at Stony Brook University, is giving Trump “a 90-percent chance of being re-elected in a landslide,” the Long Island, N.Y., school said in a recent press release.
Norpoth’s “Primary Model” has correctly predicted nearly every presidential election since 1996, missing only George Bush’s 2000 victory over Al Gore. (When the model is “applied to previous elections,” Stonybrook said, it “correctly predicts an impressive 25 of the last 27.”)
The model utilizes data from presidential primaries to help predict who will win.
“I focus on early primaries and the way the candidates perform in those early contests,” Norpoth said in the press release. “It’s a very good predictor, and a leading indicator of what’s going to happen in November.”
The professor said he was unsurprised at the model’s prediction this year, citing Trump’s performance in the primaries earlier in the winter.
“When I looked at New Hampshire and I saw that Donald Trump got 85 percent of the votes … I was pretty sure what the model was going to predict,” he said in the release.
Joe Biden, on the other hand, pulled down only 8.4% in New Hampshire, Norpoth said, a number that is “unbelievable for a candidate with any aspirations of being president,” he stated.
