President Trump is served a baked potato with butter in Tokyo, while dining with Melania Trump, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his wife, Akie Abe. (Photo: Kiyoshi Ota/Pool/Getty)
Steven Rattner, "car czar" and counselor to the Treasury secretary in the Obama administration, cites three different modelers in his N.Y. Times commentary, "Trump’s Formidable 2020 Tailwind."
The big picture: Trump wins all three modelers. Economists predict that the tailwind is large.
- Ray Fair, a professor at Yale, "found that the growth rates of gross domestic product and inflation have been the two most important economic predictors — but he also found that incumbency was also an important determinant of presidential election outcomes."
- "Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, has looked at 12 models, and Mr. Trump wins in all of them."
- "Donald Luskin of Trend Macrolytics has reached the same conclusion in his examination of the Electoral College."