Last month The Washington Post interviewed a college professor who has correctly predicted the outcome of the past eight presidential elections.
Using several factors, Prof. Allan Lichtman said all signs point to a Donald Trump victory over Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton. His prediction came before 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.
Late last week, Lichtman was asked if he had changed his prediction after the allegations came to light. He had not, he said. In fact, he doubled down on his prediction – he believes Trump will win.
Lichtman uses a 13-point model to make his predictions. He said the model showed Trump as the winner, and also said changes in the stock market pointed to a Republican victory.
Now, CNBC is reporting that Lichtman may not be alone in his prediction. An artificial intelligence system that has correctly predicted the winners of the last three U.S. presidential elections is also saying that Trump will likely win the election. The AI system, called MoglA, took a look at 20 million data points from social media platforms to come up with the prediction. The system was created by Sanjiv Rai, the founder of the Indian start-up Genic.ai, the CNBC story said.
According to the analysis from Genic.ai, Trump is 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.
“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 told CNBC.
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MoglA also correctly chose Hillary Clinton and Donald 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 claims Trump will defeat Hillary Clinton with 87 percent certainty. According to the developers of the model, they have 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.
The model has been predicting elections since 1912. It also predicted that Clinton and/or Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders could have defeated any Republican candidate other than Trump.