Stony Brook Professor: Trump Will Be Re-elected In Landslide

STONY BROOK, NY — President Donald Trump will defeat former Vice President Joe Biden in a landslide in the Nov. 3 election, says Stony Brook University professor and political scientist Helmut Norpoth.

Not only did Norpoth correctly predict Trump's win over Hillary Clinton in 2016, but he has correctly called five of the past six presidential elections using his "primary model," a statistical representation of U.S. presidential races based on data going back more than a century, according to the university.

According to Norpoth, Trump has a 91 percent chance of winning re-election. The model also has Trump securing 362 electoral votes. His prediction runs contrary to most polls — similar to 2016.

When applied to previous elections, Norpoth's primary model was accurate 25 of 27 times; missing only Al Gore's defeat to George W. Bush and Richard Nixon's loss to John F. Kennedy.

Norpoth put his model to the test for the first time in 1996 after having started working on it post-1992 election.

"My first forecast was the 1996 election, the one where Bill Clinton was re-elected for a second term," he said in a news release. "Predicting a Clinton win was considered a stretch at the time because he was pretty bad in his first term."

Norpoth continues to evolve his model. The key metric the professor used, even in its early stages, is the results of presidential primaries. The focus on those primaries is the difference between his model and others, he said.

"It’s all about primary elections, which are real electoral contests and the votes are counted and tabulated," he said. "I also use real numbers, such as the results of previous elections, which indicate whether the pendulum is swinging away from or toward the White House party. This is something that also relies on real election results and not any kind of an opinion poll."

Norpoth does not take approval ratings into account under his model, saying that it's a poll number, which he doesn't use. The primary performance of a sitting president is a proxy for that, he added.

Norpoth wasn't surprised his model predicted a landslide win for Trump.

"When I looked at New Hampshire and I saw that Donald Trump got 85 percent of the votes, and the closest challenger was Bill Weld at 10 percent, I was pretty sure what the model was going to predict," he said. "If Trump had gotten only 55 percent and an opponent had gotten 40 percent, I may not have predicted that Donald Trump would have a chance to win. Maybe. It would depend on the other side as well."

On the other side of the aisle, Norpoth believes the high amount of Democratic Party candidates, and the "inability" of one of them to get off the launchpad may have "doomed the party from the start."

"People have forgotten how Joe Biden did in New Hampshire," Norpoth said. "He was terrible. He got 8.4 percent of the vote, which is unbelievable for a candidate with any aspirations of being president."

The professor said his model is simply math.

"Everybody thinks Trump is going to go down in flames, and here I am predicting with almost total certainty that he’s going to win," he said. "It seems crazy. But it’s not."