Hillary Clinton headed into Election Day in 2016 with a lead in the polls so significant that even the establishment media outlets viewed the Democratic presidential nominee’s victory as all but certain.
At the same time, a number of predictive models, three of which were highlighted by The Epoch Times before the election, against all odds forecasted a victory for the Republican nominee, Donald Trump.
S&P 500
In 9 out of the 10 elections in which the market return was above average, the candidate from the incumbent party was reelected. That included 2016, when the S&P returned 11.9 percent in the year leading up to the election, predicting a victory by Trump.The S&P 500 return in 2016 was nearly identical to the average return for all the election years when a Republican was elected president—11.8 percent.
The Primary Model
In 2016, Helmut Norpoth made waves after forecasting an 87 percent chance of victory for Trump and getting it right. Norpoth made the prediction on March 7, 2016, eight months before Election Day.The Primary Model has picked winning candidates in 25 out of the 27 presidential elections since 1912. The model missed in 1960, one of the closest presidential elections, and 2000, when Al Gore won the popular vote, but George Bush won Florida amid a recount.
Keys to the White House
Professor Alan Lichtman correctly predicted a Trump victory in 2016 using a model he developed in collaboration with a Soviet scientist who specialized in predicting earthquakes.The model is a true-or-false test on a list of 13 keys about the incumbent administration and the challenger. If five or fewer of the keys are false, the incumbent party wins.
The keys include factors like whether “after the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives than it did after the previous midterm elections.” For the 2020 election, this key is false, since Democrats gained seats in the House in November 2018.
On key number 11, Lichtman rules that Trump has achieved no “major success in foreign or military affairs.” The assessment does not explain why the eradication of the ISIS caliphate and the withdrawal of troops from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq cannot be counted as major military successes. Lichtman likewise doesn’t explain why he discounted the Trump administration brokering the signing of the Abraham accords, arguably the biggest breakthrough toward peace in the Middle East in decades.
And on key number 12, Lichtman rules that Trump is not “charismatic or a national hero,” an assessment which would be hard to defend before the Republican party, where his approval has steadily held in the mid- to high- 80s.
With the charisma and foreign affairs keys flipped for Trump, the model would swing in favor of the president’s reelection.
