On Election Day, Americans are flooded with an avalanche of polls and predictions about who will win the presidency.
Some, like fivethirtyeight.com and Real Clear Politics, tout their scientific approach, while others are a little more unorthodox.
Here’s what they’re saying about the outcome of the 2016 election.
Nate Silver, founder of Five Thirty Eight, shot to recognition in the 2012 election by accurately predicting the outcome in all 50 states. This time, the site says Democratic hopeful Hillary Clinton has a 71.4 percent chance of winning the White House.
Allan Lichtman, an American University history professor who has correctly predicted every presidential campaign since 1984, is going with Trump.
According to The Washington Post, his system revolves around true or false statements.
“The keys to the White House, he says, are a set of 13 true/false statements,” the Post wrote. “If six of them are false, the incumbent party loses the presidency.”
In September, Lichtman predicted a win by Republican Donald Trump and still stands by it.
His views are echoed by the S&P 500 stock market index, which gives Trump an 86 percent chance of winning because the market has been down 4.5 percent, an indicator of a Trump win, according to the Huffington Post. The indicator has been right more than 86 percent of the time since 1928, and the last time it made a wrong call was in 1980, when Republican Ronald Reagan defeated Democrat Jimmy Carter.
If you’re still not convinced, you can always turn to future-predicting animals. In China, a monkey nicknamed the “king of prophets” says Trump wins.
"After ‘deliberate thought,’ the mystic monkey chose Trump, Shiyanhu Ecological Tourism Park said in a statement on its website. Without even waiting, he congratulated the cardboard candidate with a kiss on the lips," wrote the French news agency.
Meanwhile, in India, a fish named Chanakya III also chose Trump. Chanyaka II accurately predicted the outcome of the 2016 European Football championship.
The animal kingdom, however, is not unanimously for Trump.
A Scottish goat named Boots recently made its choice by biting a sign marked “Clinton,” according to The Scotsman newspaper.
Unwilling to go with what the animals think?
You could consult the so-called mask index, which is based on Halloween sales of masks for each candidate. Trump leads 55 percent to 45 percent in the survey published by the costume retail chain Spirit Halloween.
Or, you could look to Benjamin Franklin Elementary School in Yorktown Heights, New York, which chose Hillary Clinton.
For the past 48 years, every class from kindergarten to the fifth grade conducts a mock election, and they’ve picked the winner every time.
“We have minority groups, students that speak English as a second language, white collar, blue collar,” principal Patricia Moore told CBS News. “It could be representative of the nation.”
