Trump has 91% chance of winning second term, professor’s model predicts

Winning candidate calculated on early presidential nominating contest and discounting opinion surveys

President Donald Trump has a 91 per cent chance of winning the November 2020 election, according to a political science professor who has correctly predicted five out of six elections since 1996.

“The Primary Model gives Trump a 91 percent chance of winning in November,” Stony Brook professor Helmut Norpoth told Mediaite on Tuesday.

Mr Norpoth told the outlet that his model, which he curated in 1996, would have correctly predicted the outcome for 25 of the 27 elections since 1912, when primaries were introduced.

The model calculates the winning candidate based on early presidential nominating contests and placing an emphasis on how much enthusiasm candidates are able to generate early in the nominating process, the professor said.

“The terrain of presidential contests is littered with nominees who saw a poll lead in the spring turn to dust in the fall,” Mr Norpoth said.

If the prediction is correct, former vice president Joe Biden is placed at a severe disadvantage due to losses in his party’s first two presidential nominating contests in Iowa and New Hampshire.

The professor also said the model, which predicted Mr Trump’s election in 2016, worked partially by discounting opinion surveys.

“Polls and poll-based forecasts all handed Hillary Clinton a certain victory,” he said.

The prediction comes as a number other election models have suggested that Mr Trump will lose to Mr Biden as a result of a number of factors including the ongoing pandemic.

A national election model by Oxford Economics has predicted that Donald Trump will suffer a “historic defeat” in November’s election due to the coronavirus economic recession.

The Oxford model predicted the winner of the popular vote in 16 of the past 18 elections and presented a complete reversal of its prediction before the coronavirus outbreak hit the US.

Another forecast by The Washington Post preliminarily predicted Mr Trump will receive only 24 percent of the electoral college votea, but only on the condition that the economy and the president’s approval rating continues its downward trajectory.

However in Mr Norpoth’s model, not only will the president be re-elected, but he will expand his margin in the electoral college from 304 electoral votes in 2016 to 362 in 2020.

The one thing many predictions seem to agree on is that the election could rest crucially on Mr Trump’s leadership of the US through the coronavirus pandemic and mitigating the public health crisis’s impact on the economy in the upcoming months before November.