New York: Donald Trump will win the November 8 presidential election, an American professor whose model has successfully predicted all but one White House race result for the past 100 years has predicted despite the Republican nominee trailing in most opinion polls.
"I think he was the strongest candidate in the primaries and that he will prevail," Helmut Norpoth, a political science professor at State University of New York Stony Brook, told The New York Post.
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.
Gore won the popular vote, but following a disputed result in Florida, Bush was awarded more votes in the Electoral College and thus won the election.
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.
While the political ground has shifted dramatically since Norpoth first made his call, he is not budging on the outcome.
"The model predicted a Trump win in February and nothing has changed since then. Whatever happens in the real world doesn't affect the model," he said.
However, the model does not take into account the changing political landscape.
The Trump campaign has been severely damaged by the revelation of a tape earlier this month, where the former reality star is heard bragging about sexually assaulting women and getting away with it because he is a "star".
Further allegations by at least a dozen women that he sexually assaulted them - some of whom allege that the incident happened during his marriage to current wife Melania - have lead to many mainstream Republicans distancing themselves from him and a further drop in the polls.
The RealClearPolitics average shows the Republican candidate trailing rival Democrat Hillary Clinton by 6.1 percentage points.
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