The polls were wrong. The pundits were wrong. “Boots,” a 3-year-old goat in southern Scotland was wrong.
But at least two people nailed it when it came to predicting who the 45th president of the United States would be. (Actually three, if you count the Chinese “Monkey King” who picked Donald Trump.)
If you followed the election polls, you would have seen a clear and convincing victory in store for Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton. Within the past four weeks polls had Clinton winning 63 of 67 times.
So, what accounted for the polls giving Trump little chance to take the presidency, let alone to score such an overwhelming victory?
According to a USA Today story, the polls likely suffered from the “invisible Trump voter,” voters, who, when polled, failed to say they intended to vote for Trump.
The story also suggests that pollsters suffered from the inability to gauge whether those who did not vote in 2012 would do so this time around.
But two headlines that predicted a Trump win, one from a professor and one from an artificial intelligence program, were exactly on the mark, predicting Trump would win.
Allan Lictman, a professor at American University, has correctly predicted the outcome of the past eight presidential elections, and he got this one right, too.
Lichtman uses a 13-point system to make his predictions and told The Washington Post in July that all his signs pointed to a Trump victory, despite the revelation of a tape that showed Trump speaking in a derogatory way about women, and a series of women coming forward to accuse Trump of inappropriate behavior.
Lictman was asked last week if he stuck by his prediction, and he said he did.
CNBC reported last week an artificial intelligence system designed by a company called Genic.ai that has correctly predicted the winners of the last three U.S. presidential elections was also picking Trump to win.
The AI system, called MoglA, took a look at 20 million data points from social media platforms to come up with the prediction.
According to the analysis from Genic.ai, Trump was more popular than President Barack Obama was during the 2008 campaign – meaning his “engagement” numbers on social media platforms are higher than Obama’s was during the peak of Obama’s first campaign.
According to the story, the candidate with the greatest engagement numbers has won the election every time.
MoglA also correctly chose Clinton and Trump as the winners of their respective party primaries.
Rai said MoglA is a more accurate way to make a prediction of the outcome of an election because it does not “suffer from programmers/developer’s biases.” Instead, he said, “MoglA aims at learning from her environment, developing her own rules at the policy layer and developing expert systems without discarding any data.”
The Primary Model also predicted a Trump win. The model's prediction was announced on March 7. It said that with 87 percent certainty, Trump would win. The model has correctly predicted the last five presidential elections. In addition to that, the predictions were made before Trump and Clinton had won the nominations of their parties.
Who picked a Clinton win?
• The Moody Analytics’ economic election model, which has correctly predicted presidential elections since 1980, said the election will go to Clinton in a big way. The model shows Clinton winning in a landslide in the Electoral College with 332 votes to Trump’s 206. As it stands Wednesday morning, the Electoral College vote is Trump with 276, Clinton with 218. Five states, Minnesota, Michigan, Alaska, New Hampshire and Arizona are still counting ballots.
• Clinton also came out on top with 450 high school and college students in two national programs, a mock election and a statistics competition The students, from across the country, gave Clinton 332 Electoral College votes and Trump 204.
• “Kids Pick the President” voting contest, hosted by Nickelodeon, picked Clinton. The contest has correctly chosen the president in six out of the last seven presidential elections.
• Nearly every poll published in October: Sixty-three national polls that tracked a 4-way race since the start of October, gave Clinton the win. Only one poll, the L.A. Times/USC poll, ever gave Trump the lead, according to RealClearPolitics.
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