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Presidential Election Forecasting

DeSart and Holbrook Forecast Model

Dr. Jay DeSart, Associate Professor of Political Science - Utah Valley University
Dr. Thomas Holbrook, Wilder Crane Professor of Government - University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

For details about the DeSart Long-Range forecast model, those can be found here

Find details about our October daily rolling forecast here.

October 3, 2016 - The election forecast model we have developed predicts a victory for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump on November 8th.

The model, which is based on state and national polling data as well as state historical voting patterns, predicts that Secretary Clinton will receive 52.05% of the national 2-party popular vote to Donald Trumps's 47.95%. Furthermore, the model predicts that Secretary Clinton will win the Electoral College vote, 326 - 212.

The model that we have used to generate this forecast was originally published in the International Journal of Forecasting in 1999, and has undergone significant refinement since that time. Our most recent update was presented at the 2013 Meeting of the Western Political Science Association.

It has been used to generate fairly accurate predictions of the last four presidential elections. Our research, which looks at data from the elections from 1992 - 2012, shows that the model correctly predicts 93% of all state outcomes, predicts the national popular vote to within an average of 0.6% of the 2-party vote, and predicts the Electoral College vote to within 19 Electoral Votes.

Here are the state predictions, along with their respective win probabilities, as projected by the model:

Clinton		Trump
State	Win Probability	State	Win Probability
Ohio	53.6	Iowa	53.7
Florida	59.1	North Carolina	63.4
Nevada	66.4	Arizona	90.2
Colorado	70.7	Georgia	93.0
Virginia	74.3	Missouri	95.5
Wisconsin	80.4	South Carolina	98.2
New Hampshire	88.3	Mississippi	99.7
Pennsylvania	88.6	Indiana	99.7
Michigan	89.6	Arkansas	99.7
Minnesota	93.2	Louisiana	99.9
Maine	97.4	South Dakota	99.9
New Mexico	97.9	Tennessee	99.9
Oregon	98.6	Montana	99.9
Washington	99.5	Texas	100
New Jersey	99.9	West Virginia	100
Connecticut	99.9	Kansas	100
Delaware	100	Alaska	100
Illinois	100	North Dakota	100
Rhode Island	100	Alabama	100
Maryland	100	Kentucky	100
California	100	Nebraska	100
New York	100	Oklahoma	100
Massachusetts	100	Idaho	100
Vermont	100	Utah	100
Hawaii	100	Wyoming	100
DC	100

Based on these state-level projections, the distribution of possible Electoral College and Popular Vote outcomes looks like this:

Ultimately, the model suggests that Secretary Clinton has a 91.2% probability of winning, at a minimum,
the necessary 270 Electoral Votes she needs in order to win, and a 99.99% probability of winning a majority of the national 2-party popular vote