Fields Political science Alma mater University of Michigan Institution Stony Brook University | Institutions Stony Brook University Field Political Science | |
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Thesis Sources of party cohesion in the U.S. House of Representatives (1974) Known for Predicting election results Books Confidence regained, Analysis of Variance | ||
How to predict elections helmut norpoth tedxsbu
Helmut Norpoth (born 1943) is an American political scientist and professor of political science at Stony Brook University.
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Education and career
Norpoth received his undergraduate degree from the Free University of Berlin in Germany in 1966. He then attended the University of Michigan, where he received his M.A. and Ph.D. in 1967 and 1974, respectively. Before joining Stony Brook University as an assistant professor in 1979, he taught at the University of Cologne and the University of Texas. In 1980, he was promoted to associate professor at Stony Brook, and became a tenured full professor there in 1985.
Research
Norpoth's research focuses on multiple subjects in political science, including public opinion and electoral behavior, and predicting the results of elections in the United States, Great Britain, and Germany.
Norpoth developed the Primary Model, a statistical model he uses to predict the results of United States presidential elections based on data going back to 1912. He has used the model to correctly predict the winner of all six presidential elections from 1996 to 2016, including the Donald Trump victory in the 2016 election. This model is based on two factors: whether the party that has been in power for a long time seems to be about to lose it, and whether a given candidate did better in the primaries than his or her opponent. In February 2015, he projected that Republicans had a 65 percent chance of winning the general election the following year. In 2016, this model gained significant media attention because it predicted that Donald Trump would win the general election. In response to critics who cite polls in which Clinton leads Trump by a significant margin, Norpoth has said that these polls do not take into account who will actually vote in November, writing, "...nearly all of us say, oh yes, I'll vote, and then many will not follow through."
