Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at the South Florida Fairgrounds in West Palm Beach, Fla

Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at the South Florida Fairgrounds in West Palm Beach, Florida.

(Stephen Crowley | The New York Times)

Stony Brook, N.Y. — A SUNY professor continues to project Donald Trump as the likely winner of this year's election and he's critiquing polls that predict the opposite in a new opinion piece.

Helmut Norpoth has been predicting a Trump victory since early this year. His model currently projects a win for the Republican with a certainty of 87 to 99 percent.

Norpoth is a professor at Stony Brook University on Long Island.

That flies in the face of just about every other major election forecast out there, which mostly give an edge to Democrat Hillary Clinton, notes the Daily Mail.

Norpoth wrote in The Hill that although the race looks decided, current polling methods are "bunk."

The projections for Clinton are all based on opinion polls, which are flawed because they don't reflect actions, Norpoth wrote. They're about what voters think of Clinton or Trump, but they can't tell us exactly how voters will act on those thoughts.

"It is ingrained in all of us that voting is civic duty," he says. "So nearly all of us say, oh yes, I'll vote, and then many will not follow through."

Instead of opinion polling, Norpoth relies on statistics from candidates' performances in party primaries and patterns in the electoral cycle to forecast results. The model correctly predicted the victor in every presidential election since 1996, according to the Daily Mail.

Running the model on earlier campaigns comes up with the correct outcome for every race since 1912, except the 1960 election.

Norpoth wrote on his site that Trump's victories in early primary states are key predictors of his chances in November. The cycle also favors the GOP after two terms of a Democrat in the White House.

"So hold off on trusting poll-driven proclamations of a Clinton victory just yet," Norpoth wrote in The Hill. "Voters have a way of always getting the last word."

Contact Kevin Tampone anytime: Email | Twitter | Google + | 315-454-2112