Researchers in China use computer modelling to predict Trump election victory
A team from Shanghai’s prestigious Fudan University forecasts a return to the White House for the Republican nominee
The forecast was issued by the university’s Centre for Complex Decision Analysis (CCDA) on Sunday, just two days before Tuesday’s election showdown, amid a flurry of weekend polls that showed the race still neck-and-neck in the final sprint.
The researchers – led by Tang Shiping, from Fudan’s School of International Relations and Public Affairs – used a computational simulation to predict vote shares and electoral college votes in eight key states.
The chosen states – which all registered a gap between Republicans and Democrats of less than 5 per cent in the 2020 presidential election – included the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The eighth state selected for the modelling was Florida, where US presidential elections once were decided by the slimmest of margins. In recent years, the sunshine state has proven reliably Republican.
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The technique, called agent-based modelling (ABM), mimics the actions and interactions of individual agents within a system to analyse complex behaviours and predict outcomes.
