[quote=paramount]A professor of political science at Stony Brook University has forecasted that Donald Trump has a minimum 97 percent chance of winning the general election as the Republican nominee.
“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 said, “if he’s a nominee of the [Republican] party.”
Norpoth’s primary model works for every presidential election since 1912, with the notable exception of the 1960 election. These results give the model an accuracy of 96.1 percent.[/quote]
Sounds like a truly awful model.
Trump wins the nomination, the Hillary Machine grinds him under her heels. He’s taken advantage of quirks in the Republican party and republican primary system. Moderate republicans don’t like him. Swing voters HATE him. He’s very poorly positioned to pivot to the middle for the general election campaign. He lacks the strong ground game Barrack Obama had in certain key swing states that helped give him the edge in 2008.
A Trump nomination could be catastrophic to Republicans down-ticket. Right now, if the Republicans nominate Rubio, I can see them keeping the Senate with 51 votes to 49 Democrats (and keeping the House by a healthy margin until 2020 because of gerrymandering). With Trump? The Democrats are likely to take the Senate and might even give the House a fight.
There hasn’t been a candidate quite like Trump before, so any model is likely going to have some issues.
