I was paging through Facebook this afternoon when I saw some goober was predicting a 91 percent likelihood that Donald Trump would be re-elected. He said Trump would win the Electoral College by 362-176 and would carry New York and Hawaii, two of the most solidly blue states in the country.
At first I thought my friend Mick — perhaps the least accurate prognosticator I know — had made a public prediction. He has been saying Trump would win and even said there was a possibility of a landslide. Mick is a very talented person and he has some wonderful talents, but making predictions isn’t one of them.
Just ask President Mitt Romney.
But when I found the name of the goober, it wasn’t my friend. It was a guy with a very goobery name — Helmut Norpoth — who claims to have picked the winner in 24 of the last 26 presidential elections. That means he started out by nailing Woodrow Wilson over Big Bill Taft and Teddy Roosevelt.
Most of them probably weren’t real tough calls.
Supposedly he did pick Trump in 2016, which is impressive, but apparently his lack of respect for Joe Biden was because he did poorly in Iowa and New Hampshire. In addition, the prediction was made in March, before the death toll from Covid-19 started to climb.
It’s understandable if Helmut is slipping. Even if he made his first prediction when he was 7 years old, he would be 115 now. As far as he is concerned, both Trump and Biden are just young whippersnappers.
You’re showing your age with that term.
Hey, Helmut probably also uses “shenanigans.” When he was a young whippersnapper, his father told him there were two words he didn’t want him to use. were swell and lousy.
“Great, Dad,” Helmut said. “What are the words?”
There it is. Four more years of Trump, at least if Helmut is right. Incidentally, 24 of 26 is kind of misleading. He’s actually only 77 years old, so even if he came out of the womb and predicted FDR over Dewey in 1944, eith of those 26 elections happened before he was born.
As goofy as my friend Mick cane be, I’ve never known him to predict things that have already happened.