ATLANTA, U.S. — With less than a year to go before the next U.S. presidential election, former President Donald Trump remains the solid front-runner in the Republican primary race, polls show. Trump has been charged in four criminal cases, including one related to mishandling classified documents, but that seems to have little effect on his popularity.
To get a better idea of how the election is shaping up, I recently visited professor Alan Abramowitz of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. He is known for his extensive use of economic and polling data to develop a model for predicting election results. His model correctly predicted the winner of the popular vote in every presidential election from 1988 to 2012. It was off in 2016, when Trump failed to win the popular vote, but the model was revised and the prediction was correct again in 2020.
