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Moody's Analytics: Hillary Clinton Will Win Presidency
Monday, May 23, 2016 12:58 PM
By: Joe Crowe
Moody's Analytics has released its election model and is predicting that Hillary Clinton will be the next president of the United States.
Moody's Analytics has correctly predicted the winner of the presidency since 1980, basing its predictions on a two-year change in economic data in home prices, income growth, and gasoline prices, according to an NPR report.
Moody's analyst, Dan White, said that those three things affect a person's daily life the most.
"Things that affect marginal voter behavior most significantly are things that the average American is going to run into on an almost daily basis," White said.
The Moody's analyst told NPR that a decline in gas prices points to a win for the incumbent Democratic Party.
"We are currently in the largest decline in gas prices we've had going back to World War II," White said.
The model predicts that the Democratic nominee, who is likely to be Clinton, will earn 332 electoral votes while presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump will win 206.
Moody's also looked at the approval rating of the incumbent president, measuring a two-year range moving up to election day.
White said Obama's approval rating is key to the economic model's prediction. If the rise in approval ratings holds, Obama could have the highest approval rating since President Ronald Reagan at the end of the Cold War.
"President Obama's approval rating has crossed over the important 50-percent threshold for the first time in almost four years," he said in the analysis.
White added that gasoline prices could rise and Obama's approval rating could fall, but those are the only likely indicators that could shift the prediction to the Republican Party's favor.
The oldest prediction model, created at Yale by economics professor Ray Fair, disagrees. Fair wrote in the Los Angeles Times that, based on economic growth per capita in the four years before an election, "the Democratic nominee will lose — through no fault of her own."
