If you haven't heard of Helmut Norpoth, he's a professor of political science at Stony Brook University, which is about 30 miles east of where I live on Long Island, and in 1996, he created a model for predicting the winner of presidential elections which he calls the "Primary Model." In 2016, he correctly predicted Trump would beat Hillary Clinton, and he's predicting a 91 percent probability that he will win reelection this year.
In all, Norpoth's model has accurately predicted the winner in five of the last six presidential elections and, retroactively, in all but one going back to 1912. If you're counting, that would make 25 out of 27 presidential elections successfully called. The two he misfired on were John F. Kennedy in 1960 and George W. Bush in 2000. With a record like that, it's a wonder Professor Norpoth hasn't relocated to Las Vegas.
First off, I love that Norpoth can magically transport himself into the past and retroactively pick presidential races that happened not only before he came up with his model, but apparently before he was even born. That's a real gift he's got. I've been thinking about writing a review of Dave Brubeck's Time Out album, which was released while my parents were still dating. I'll let you know how it turns out as soon as I look up what everyone else had to say about it.
In all seriousness, though, most of Norpoth's picks weren't all that earth-shattering. For instance, he had Bill Clinton beating Bob Dole in 1996. Not much of a shocker there; most pundits felt Clinton would win. He then went with Al Gore in 2000, and although Bush won the electoral college, Gore won the popular vote. Again, most of the polls had Gore winning. He did pick Bush in '04. I'll give him that one. The "smart" money was on John Kerry. But choosing Barack Obama in both 2008 and 2012 was about as much of a stretch as reaching for the remote control on the coffee table. I could've done that. In fact, I did, as I recall. As for Trump's election in 2016, yours truly wrote a piece in August of the previous year sounding the alarm bell that I thought Trump could win. Spoiler alert, I turned out to be quite the prophet. Perhaps I should call up the Dean of Political Science at Stony Brook and ask him for a job. Or maybe I could contact Simon & Schuster and ask them for an advance so I can publish my "findings."
Norpoth basis his predictions on two main criteria. The first, as you might surmise from the name, is based on the relative strength of each party's nominee's performance in the primaries. The stronger the nominee's performance during the primaries, the better the odds of that nominee winning the general election. Conversely, the weaker the performance, the less likely it is that the nominee will prevail.
The second criterion Norpoth uses is to examine how successful incumbency is when running for a second term. Going all the way back to 1912, the incumbent party has been reelected every time with the exception of Jimmy Carter in 1980. Additionally, the model also revealed that on three separate occasions since 1912, the incumbent party was able to win reelection multiple times: Harding / Coolidge / Hoover (1920, 24 & 28); FDR / Truman (1932, 36, 40, 44 and 48); and Reagan / Bush (1980, 84 & 88). Curious that Norpoth considers George H. W. Bush to be an extension of the Reagan presidency instead of the one-term president he was. He's obviously never spoken to anyone in the conservative movement. Had he done so, I'm sure he would've gotten quite an earful. Even with Dan Quayle as his running mate, Bush 41 was never one of the faithful.
But I digress. Let's look at criterion number one. The first thing that should stand out is that Norpoth is skewing the data by conveniently forgetting to mention that incumbents usually don't face tough primary challenges. That's because the party goes to great lengths to prevent such a thing from happening. The rare exceptions were Howard Taft in 1912, Gerald Ford in 1976 and Jimmy Carter in '80, and all three lost their respective general elections. I leave out Hubert Humphrey in 1968 because while Humphrey was Lyndon Johnson's VP, he never actually campaigned that year. The DNC virtually gave him the nomination, which angered a great many progressives at the Convention. But that's another story for another time.
The truth is that presidents like Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were all extremely popular incumbents who were clear favorites going into their reelection campaigns. And that, more than any "performance" they had in the primaries, was the principle reason they won a second term. Conversely, each of the incumbents who lost their reelection bid had serious flaws which made them ripe for a challenge and thus vulnerable in the general. Hillary Clinton, though not running as an incumbent, was so badly flawed, she was almost beaten by a self-described socialist before eventually losing to the worst candidate ever to seek elected office. That Norpoth doesn't get this is nothing short of astonishing.
Sadly, his second criterion isn't any better. Norpoth commits two huge errors that any first-year grad student would've picked up instantly. The first is that he ignores trends in American politics that have come to define the nation at crucial moments in its history. Here, it's obvious Norpoth is out of his depth. I'll explain.
The progressivism of the early twentieth century led to the rise of Teddy Roosevelt which then led to the election of Howard Taft as a check. The interventionism of Woodrow Wilson eventually led to a repudiation of the League of Nations, a growing isolationism and the roaring twenties. FDR's election was the natural result of laissez-faire gone amuck. Post World War II America was fat, dumb and happy, but for eleven percent of the population, it was anything but happy. The Great Society of LBJ was supposed to fix with that, but instead got us Nixon's Southern Strategy. Jimmy Carter was the antidote to Nixon's, and by extension Ford's, corruption. Reagan's ascendancy ushered in the beginning of a burgeoning anti-government movement that still exists to this day. Clinton's centrism rubbed progressives the wrong way and that led Bush II. His incompetence eventually led to Obama's two landslide wins. And that brings us to the white resentment that fueled Trump's win. A sociology major could figure this out in two seconds.
The second error is even more egregious. Even allowing for political trends, the simple and undeniable truth is that over the last hundred or so years the majority of nominees who won the presidency were simply better than the opponents they ran against. In fact, of the 27 presidential elections that Norpoth's model looked at, only a half dozen or so were close; the rest were landslides. Any half-way decent pollster could've predicted them; in fact, most did; the obvious exceptions being Truman over Dewey in '48, which took everybody by surprise, and Kennedy over Nixon in '60, which even Norpoth's own model missed.
Look, I'm not saying Trump can't win. He did it once, he's certainly capable of doing it again. As they say in the sports world, that's why they play the games. But giving him a 91 percent chance of winning based on a lack of tough primary or some rule that incumbents automatically win reelection is shoddy science, and it ignores the preponderance of evidence which shows that this president is immensely unpopular. The polling for Trump is consistent with other first-term presidents like Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush, both of whom failed to win a second term. Carter and Bush were polling at 31 and 38 percent respectively at this point in their presidencies. Trump currently stands at 38 percent. All three polls were taken from Gallup, the only polling firm that can go back that far.
The fact is that no president in the modern era has been so consistently under water for this long and been reelected. Even Gerald Ford, who was polling at 45 percent going into the summer of 1976, still ended up losing, so even if Trump manages to get his approval up into the mid-40s, that's still no guarantee he will win. What's particularly striking about the Ford analogy is that Ford was dogged throughout his brief stint in the White House by his connection to his predecessor, Nixon, whom he unwisely pardoned. Well, FYI, Trump is Nixon on steroids.
The bottom line is this: the Primary Model, far from being a silver bullet when it comes to predicting outcomes, is simply a reinvention of the same wheel pollsters have been utilizing for quite some time to make their predictions. What Helmut Norpoth is hoping you won't notice are the extra spokes he added to make the wheel look more impressive than it really is.
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