According to my local tv news this morning, Western Illinois University, which has correctly predicted every Presidential winner since the 1976 election, has predicted an eventual winning ticket of Bernie Sanders/Martin O’Malley.
Sounds like they are really putting their prediction record on the line with this one.
The part about correctly picking every winner since 1976 appears to be a fiction added to the story in the course of traveling around the internet.
The two people running the Mock Presidential Election at WIU have only done so there in 2007 and 2011 (and they did correctly select Obama both times). A WIU newspaper (pdf) from November 2007 discusses the mock election but does not mention anything about any prior ones by those professors, or any track record of previous accuracy.
Those two guys previously worked together in 1975 at a different university and apparently conducted a mock election then, which correctly selected Carter, although I can only find secondhand references to that one. I can find no reference at all to any mock elections between 1975 and 2007, and their own website only says that they have conducted them “off and on.”
ETA: Also, please note that their Sanders prediction was made in November of last year.
>Sanders winning West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Utah
>Jeb! winning Illinois and Maryland
>Jeb! getting the nomination
These predictions are literally shit-a lobotomized monkey masturbating over a map of the United States could do much, much better.
TV news is TV news, of course, but this particular local news channel has an excellent record of fact-checking their stories. Their political reporting in particular is usually right on point.
If this is as wildly inaccurate as you are saying and WIU has NOT predicted election outcomes correctly since 1976, it surprises me that they’d put it on. Seems easy enough for them to check before going on the air. And if they were only airing the story to laugh at it, they would have said so.
Curious. I think I need to have a little chat with my tv station.
It’s a mock election not a prediction. The college students in question are voting for who they want not who they think will win.
It’s kind of been going on since the 1976 cycle. It just hasn’t been happening at WIU. The two grad students who started a mock election program at the Univ of Iowa. One of them took it to the Univ of Missouri -Columbia. It’s the third in the cycle since they moved to WIU. So a couple guys running a mock election have seen that process pick the winner since 1975. It hasn’t always been WIU.
Again, though, it’s a mock election process that has a limited demographic of midwest college students. The supposed big stunner was picking Obama in 2008. Is that really all that surprising considering the voters in the mock election though? A bunch of college students (a demographic where Obama was strong) picked Obama. Shocked I am! 
That demographic strongly supports Sanders in polls. He wins the general in a landslide. Shocked I am! 
I predict they miss both major party nominees in a strange cycle.
Well, go Leathernecks!
Who is surprised that Sanders wins a mock election at a public university?
Plus the election must have been held at a kegger out at Lake Argyle. Jeb?!? carrying Illinois & Hawaii, Sanders carrying Utah, Wyoming, Oklahoma?
~
5 time champ, sometimes attended classes at Western Illinois University 1973-74