A professor of Political Science at Stony Brook University thinks he knows, with almost perfect certainty, who will win the presidential election and his result is frightening.

Many of us first heard of Professor Helmut Norpoth during the 2012 election, when he predicted that Barack Obama would emerge the winner. Okay, he was an incumbent and, well, look who he was running against, but still, his model has accurately predicted elections going back more than a century, with the exception of one. Now, he’s predicting that the winner will be Donald Trump.

His model is called the primary model, along with cyclical movement.

Professor Helmut Norpoth’s statistical modeling gives Trump with a 97 percent chance of beating Hillary Clinton in the general election. He’d have an even better shot against Bernie Sanders – 99 percent.

‘The bottom line is that the primary model, using also the cyclical movement, makes it almost certain that Donald Trump will be the next president,’ Norpoth told Stony Brook’s school newspaper, The Statesman, ‘if he’s a nominee of the [Republican] party.’

Source: Daily Mail

The forecast is based on the fact that Democrats have now held the White House for the last two terms.

This 2016 forecast rests on a model that tracks cyclical movements in American presidential elections. It goes back to 1828, when popular voting became widespread and the two-party system took hold. Over nearly two centuries, American presidential elections have exhibited a distinct cycle. This is not the pattern associated with partisan realignments that may last 30 years or so, but a shorter cycle that relates to party control of the White House.

After one term the party in the White House has won nearly every election between 1960 and 2012; six of seven,
to be exact, averaging 54.7% of the two-party vote. On the other hand, after two terms or more, the White House party has lost nearly every election; again, six of seven, averaging 49.4% of the two-party vote. Re-election looks like a sure thing when the party is in office just one term, while a change in the White House looms after two or more terms, as will be the case in 2016. The change may not be of landslide magnitude, as is quite common in victories after one term. And the 2000 election was a loss for the White House party only in the Electoral College, not the popular vote.

Now that we’re closer to the election, Norpath has narrowed the predicted results down to indicate a Trump victory, no matter who the Democratic nominee is.

Bernie Sanders image via Wikimedia, Hillary Clinton image via Flickr. Donald Trump image via Wikipedia.