The media thinks President Donald Trump is on the ropes in his bid for reelection, with former Vice President Joe Biden leading in every poll.
But one expert says Trump has ’em just where he wants ’em.
Stony Brook professor Helmut Norpoth, who correctly predicted Trump’s shocking 2016 victory, is already calling 2020.
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And he’s calling it for Trump.
“The Primary Model gives Trump a 91 percent chance of winning in November,” he told the Mediaite website.
His unique Primary Model uses data from primaries to estimate levels of enthusiasm for a candidate.
He created it in 1996, and the model has since called five of six elections correctly (he missed with George W. Bush in 2000). He also took data from every election since the 1912 introduction of the primary system to see how it would’ve done – and it missed just one other time, incorrectly predicting Richard Nixon over John F. Kennedy in 1960.
“This model gets it right for 25 of the 27 elections since 1912, when primaries were introduced,” he boasted to Mediaite.
Norpoth told the website that not only will Trump win the election, but he’ll do it with an even bigger margin in the Electoral College.
In 2016, the traditionally blue “rust belt” states turned red to give Trump his margin of victory in the Electoral College, 304-227 over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
But Norpoth says Trump will pick off some more Democratic states, this time beating Biden by 362-176.
That’s on par with former President Barack Obama’s 2008 victory over then-Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz), 365-173.
That would seem to fly in the face of the latest polls, which show Biden with a healthy lead over Trump both nationally and in multiple key swing states.
Biden has a lead of 8.3 percentage points nationally in the latest polling averages from both FiveThirtyEight and RealClearPolitics, and The Economist gives Biden a 99 percent chance of winning the popular vote and 91 percent odds of taking the Electoral College.
Trump says his own internal numbers show he’s actually ahead – something he said in 2016, which was dismissed as bluster at the time but turned out to be correct.
Trump campaign spokesperson Hogan Gidley also dismissed the public polls.
“A lot of those polls are junk,” he said on Fox News this week, saying many of them – including those on Fox News – are “skewed to the left.”
And there are already signs that the polls are starting to swing back in the president’s favor.
One poll from CNBC and Change Research showed Trump quickly gaining ground across the key states he needs to win reelection.
In Pennsylvania, for example, Biden had an eight-point lead just weeks ago in that same poll… but is ahead by just two points now. In Florida, Biden’s seven-point lead is down to just three.
The poll also shows tightening races in North Carolina, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona.
But Norpoth says don’t pay too much attention to those, no matter who’s up or down.
“The terrain of presidential contests is littered with nominees who saw a poll lead in the spring turn to dust in the fall,” Norpoth told Mediaite. “The list is long and discouraging for early frontrunners. Beginning with Thomas Dewey in 1948, it spans such notables as Richard Nixon in 1960, Jimmy Carter in 1980, Michael Dukakis in 1988, George H.W. Bush in 1992, and John Kerry in 2004, to cite just the most spectacular cases.”
He says he was able to correctly call the 2016 election precisely because he ignored the polls.
“Polls and poll-based forecasts all handed Hillary Clinton a certain victory,” he recalled.
So whatever happened that was missed by the polls in 2016 could be about to happen again – and Trump could stun the media and the “experts” one more time.
— Walter W. Murray is a reporter for The Horn News. He is an outspoken conservative and a survival expert, and is the author of “America’s Final Warning.”