Prominent polling analyst Predicts Clinton’s landslide victory in US Polls, Democratic US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Republican candidate Donald Trump,  Nate Silver, opinion poll, analysis , FiveThirtyEight

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has an 80.3% chance of winning the US presidential election, prominent polling analyst Nate Silver has said. Silver gives Republican candidate Donald Trump a 19.7% chance of becoming the next US president.

Silver, editor-in-chief of opinion poll analysis website FiveThirtyEight, rose to prominence when he predicted perfectly the results of the 2012 US presidential election, with accurate readings for all 50 states.

According to The Guardian, while many pundits saw a tight race between President Barack Obama and then Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, it was Silver who accurately estimated a 332-206 electoral college result. Not a one-hit wonder, Silver had also successfully predicted the results of the 2008 election, getting 49 of the 50 states right and anticipating the popular vote margin to within one percentage point.

Silver has two other polling models; the ‘polls-plus’, which includes the economic index and probabilities arrived at from the historical accuracy of election polls, and the ‘now-cast’, which predicts what would happen if the election were held now. The ‘polls-plus’ method narrows the odds to 73.5%-26.5% for Clinton, with the ‘now-cast’ method giving Clinton a runaway victory at 85.5%-14.5%.

For this election cycle, Silver posits in his ‘polls-only’ model that Clinton will win 353.8 electoral votes to Trump’s 183.4, and win the popular vote with 49.1%, while Trump will get 41.8%. Third-party Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson will receive only 0.8 votes from the electoral college and 7.8% of the popular vote. A candidate needs at least 270 electoral votes to take the White House.

“Trump has never been ahead of Clinton in the general election campaign,” Silver said in an appearance on ABC News. “He did a great job of appealing to the 40% of the GOP he had to win the election, the primary — a lot different than winning 51% of 100%.”

src:thewire