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The Bern Report reports
Dr. Rick Hardy and Dr. John Hemingway have been leading Mock Presidential Elections [at Western Illinois University] since 1975. During that time, students who have participated in these mock elections have chosen the winning party with 100% accuracy and have an astonishing record in selecting presidential winners.
On the Democratic side for the Primaries Sanders won[1] by close to a 2 to 1 margin over challenger Hillary Clinton.
[...] After nominating Sanders, the student Democrats put him up against Jeb Bush, who received the Republican nomination, with Bernie winning the electoral college by nearly a 4 to 1 margin and a decisive win for the popular vote.
This simulation always takes place the year before the presidential election year, and three months before the actual Iowa caucuses. The genesis of this mock presidential election began at the University of Iowa in 1975 with two political science doctoral students, John Hemingway and Rick Hardy. In that year, students selected Jimmy Carter over Gerald Ford--long before anyone really knew of Jimmy Carter.
In the years that followed, Rick Hardy expanded the format and engaged thousands of students at the University of Missouri-Columbia where students registered a perfect record of selecting the subsequent winning presidential party. In 2007 and 2011, Hardy and Hemingway teamed up again to conduct a massive campus-wide simulation at Western Illinois University. In 2007, Western students selected Barack Obama as president at a time when no one thought he could win! And, in 2011, students narrowly re-elected President Obama.
[1] Content is behind scripts.
(Score: 5, Informative) by takyon on Saturday November 14 2015, @05:01PM
Clinton Has 45-To-1 'Superdelegate' Advantage Over Sanders [npr.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Saturday November 14 2015, @05:31PM
Clinton had a significant superdelegate advantage over Obama too. Actually, most of the advantages she has over Sanders this time around, she had over Obama in 2008. What's abundantly clear is that she had no clue she was going to face anything close to a serious challenge either in 2008 or this year.
I'm not saying Bernie Sanders will win, though, because the idea of figuring out who will definitely win 2 months before the first vote has been cast by anybody seems like a silly exercise. Supporters of each candidate seem to go to great lengths to say "My candidate is going to win, all you other people are suckers!", and any measure that says that somebody else is going to win must be hopelessly biased.
But it's easy to imagine scenarios where all the calculus gets turned on its head: Somebody finds something that appears to be definitive proof of a scandalous activity on the part of a candidate. Somebody's plane crashes and the candidate dies. Somebody says something that is in context perfectly harmless but the media turns into an endlessly repeated 15-second sound bite and uses it to crucify the candidate. And so on - there are mistakes that any candidate can make that are non-recoverable (and all of these have happened to candidates for various high offices in the last couple of decades).
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Saturday November 14 2015, @06:46PM
From the summary it doesn't sound like an actual prediction per se. Just "vote for who you want to win"...and for some reason it keeps turning out prophetic.
Putting too much faith in it would seem to be edging into Gambler's Fallacy territory in my estimation.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"