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With four months until Election Day, two forecasters who predicted Donald Trump's 2016 victory see President Joe Biden as the favorite to win this November.
While most polls and analysts said Trump would lose in 2016, a handful of forecasters foresaw Trump's defeat of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. They have received heightened attention in the past few election cycles, as many observers view their predictions with more credibility now, compared with those who believed Clinton would handily win the election.
This election is still months away, and much could happen before November that could change the outcome of the race. But two major forecasters have predicted Biden could win the election, while two others have not yet made a prediction.
Newsweek reached out by email to the Biden and Trump campaigns for comment, as well as three of the four forecasters.
The Primary Model, which comes from Helmut Norpoth, a professor of political science at Stony Brook University, shows Biden with a 75 percent chance of winning in the Electoral College in November, based on the performance of the two candidates in early primary races.
"Biden won the Democratic contests in those states by far larger margins than Trump did in Republican ones," Norpoth wrote. "What also benefits Biden in the general election is an electoral cycle that favors the sitting president. In a nutshell, a White House incumbent facing no significant challenge in primaries almost always wins re-election."
He gave Trump an 87 percent chance of victory in 2016 but also predicted he would win in 2020. Trump narrowly lost in several key swing states needed to win the Electoral College vote that year.
A model by Ray Fair, a professor of economics at Yale University, views Biden as the favorite to win the popular vote in November. His model is largely based on economic factors such as the growth and inflation rates.
As of April 25, Fair believed Biden would receive about 51.7 percent of the two-party share of the popular vote. Notably, it's unclear whether that would necessarily translate into an Electoral College victory. His model also says that if Biden does not run again, Democrats would be favored to win only 49.6 percent of the popular vote.
Two other experts who predicted Trump's 2016 win—Allan Lichtman, a history professor at American University, and Alan Abramowitz, a professor of political science at Emory University—have not made formal predictions.
Lichtman, however, has rejected calls from some Democrats to replace Biden as the Democratic nominee after his poor debate performance last week.
Lichtman, using his Keys model, has correctly predicted the winner of every presidential election since 1984. His model uses 13 "diagnostic questions" that determine whether the president—or his party's nominee if he isn't running again—will be reelected.
Lichtman told Newsweek on Friday that a Biden candidacy would give Democrats the best chances in November, according to the Keys model.
"Biden checks off the incumbency key and the internal party contest key. Six of the remaining 11 keys would have to fall to predict the Democrats' defeat. Thus, a lot would have to go wrong to predict Biden's defeat in November," he said.
Lichtman warned that if the party drops Biden from the ticket, the president would lose these two advantages because there is no consensus replacement. If Biden is forced out, he could resign, which would give Vice President Kamala Harris the incumbency advantage, Lichtman said.
During an interview with CNN last week, Lichtman said that replacing Biden would be a "huge mistake" and that debate performances "can be overcome."
"This is all foolhardy nonsense. The same pundits and pollsters that led us down the primrose path in 2016 are giving the Democrats horrible advice," he said.
Abramowitz told Marketplace he will not be making a forecasting model in 2024, saying that forecasting based on economic conditions is "just not working very well anymore."
"I know that enterprise continues, people will continue to do this," he said. "I am so skeptical about the value of this particular enterprise right now. I'd rather leave it to others to try to figure out how to do this. And I think a lot of us who've been in this game for a long time probably feel about the same way."
Update 7/5/24, 11:39 a.m. ET: This story was updated with comments from history professor Allan Lichtman.
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About the writer
Andrew Stanton is a Newsweek weekend reporter based in Maine. His role is reporting on U.S. politics and social issues. ... Read more