Wednesday, November 2, 2016

An emerging journalistic subgenre

From the Washington Post:
Last month, the man who's tried to turn vote prediction into a science predicted a Trump win.

Allan J. Lichtman, distinguished professor of history at American University, said Democrats would not be able to hold on to the White House.

In the intervening weeks, the campaign was rocked by a series of events. The release of the Access Hollywood tape obtained by The Washington Post was followed by accusations from a growing list of women of various improprieties on Trump's part, ranging from verbal abuse and harassment to outright sexual assault. Fix founder Chris Cillizza named Trump the winner of the inauspicious “Worst Week in Washington” award for four weeks running. At the same time, WikiLeaks released internal Clinton campaign emails, and the U.S. government flatly accused the Kremlin of being involved. And let's not forget those presidential debates.

So plenty has changed. But one thing hasn't: Lichtman, author of “Predicting the Next President: The Keys to the White House 2016,” is sticking with his prediction of a Trump victory.

If you aren't familiar with his somewhat unique prediction system, here are the basics: The keys to the White House, he says, are a set of 13 true/false statements. If six of them are false, the incumbent party loses the presidency. His system has correctly predicted the winner of the popular vote in every U.S. presidential election since 1984. Our first interview went into the keys more in-depth, and in September he said the keys were settled enough to make an official prediction of a Democratic loss and a Trump win.



From CNBC via Yahoo:


 An artificial intelligence system that correctly predicted the last three U.S. presidential elections puts Republican nominee Donald Trump ahead of Democrat rival Hillary Clinton in the race for the White House.

MogIA was developed by Sanjiv Rai, founder of Indian start-up Genic.ai. It takes in 20 million data points from public platforms including Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in the U.S. and then analyzes the information to create predictions.

The AI system was created in 2004, so it has been getting smarter all the time. It had already correctly predicted the results of the Democratic and Republican Primaries.

Data such as engagement with tweets or Facebook Live videos have been taken into account. The result is that Trump has overtaken the engagement numbers of Barack Obama 's peak in 2008 — the year he was elected president — by 25 percent.

Rai said that his AI system shows that the candidate in each election who had leading engagement data ended up winning the election.

"If Trump loses, it will defy the data trend for the first time in the last 12 years since Internet engagement began in full earnest," Rai wrote in a report sent to CNBC.



Election wiz predicts Donald Trump will win Oval Office

Donald Trump may be behind in most polls, but one veteran New York prognosticator still predicts he will win come Election Day.

“I think he was the strongest candidate in the primaries and that he will prevail,” Helmut Norpoth, a political science professor at SUNY Stony Brook, told The Post on Monday, even as the RealClearPolitics average shows the Republican candidate trailing Democrat Hillary Clinton by 6.1 percentage points.

Norpoth developed a model that, applied retroactively in earlier races, would have correctly predicted the winner of every presidential election since 1912 — with the exception of 2000, when predicted winner Al Gore barely lost to George W. Bush.

The model looks at which of the candidates performed better in the primaries and caucuses and concludes that the stronger performer there will enter the White House.





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