Trump will win: prof who’s accurately predicted every presidential race since 1984

Donald Trump is going to win.

So says Allan Lichtman, the distinguished professor who has correctly predicted every U.S. presidential election since 1984.

His predictions, according to The Washington Post, are based on a set of 13 true/false questions he and a Russian scientist developed in the 1980s.

“True” answers favour the incumbent party – in this case, the Democrats and Hillary Clinton. By the same token, answers of “false” favour the other party – the Republicans and Trump. Six or more false answers point to a changing of the guard in the White House, according to Lichtman’s theory.

When Lichtman sat down to make his prediction for the Nov. 8 vote, he found six of the keys yielded a “false” response. That means things aren’t looking good for the Democratic party’s bid to keep the White House.

Those questions, or “Keys to the White House,” in Lichtman’s terms, according to the Post, are:

One of the indicators yielding a false answer is the fourth, which looks at third-party support.

Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson is polling at 4.8 per cent of the popular vote, according to the most recent numbers from fivethirtyeight.com.

Anything higher than five per cent support for a third party points to dissatisfaction with the incumbent president’s party, Lichtman told the Post.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll published over the weekend illustrated a once-again tightening race between the Republican and Democratic presidential nominees.

Only one per cent separates Clinton from Trump, who polled at 46 per cent and 45 per cent respectively, according to the report. The spread is statistically insignificant.

The poll was conducted through telephone interviews on Oct. 28 and 29, after the bombshell revelation from the FBI head, who sent a letter to Congress alerting members the investigation into Clinton’s email server was no longer considered “closed.”

The poll indicated four per cent of voters support Johnson – a  slightly lower number than the FiveThirtyEight calculations – and two per cent support for the Green Party’s Jill Stein.

The website, which aggregates and analyzes opinion polls, currently shows Clinton has a less than 80 per cent chance of winning, while Trump has a 21.1 per cent chance.

Perhaps one of Lichtman’s keys will flip to favour Clinton and the Democrats; other indicators that yield a false: the first, third, seventh, 11th and 12th.

Or, perhaps, it’s possible that Trump will defy the odds, “shatter patterns of history that have held for more than 150 years [and] lose this election even if the historical circumstances favour it,” Lichtman told The Washington Post.