Will Redskins Rule predict presidential election winner again?
By: fox5dc.com staff
POSTED: OCT 14 2016 07:57 PM EDT
UPDATED: OCT 14 2016 08:52 PM EDT
WASHINGTON - With the presidential election only a few weeks away, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are likely looking for any edge before voters hit the polls on Nov. 8. But as history has shown, the candidates should pay extra attention on how the Washington Redskins perform in their next game against the Philadelphia Eagles.
The so-called Redskins Rule has successfully predicted the result in 17 of the last 19 presidential elections since the Redskins moved to Washington D.C. back in 1937.
So how does the rule work? If the Redskins win their final home game prior to the election, the party of the incumbent president would retain the presidency. But if the Redskins lose, the candidate for the opposing party would become president.
If the rule holds true, Clinton is surely hoping for a Redskins win while Trump should be rooting for the Eagles.
....
The rule broke down in 2016:
Redskins Rule
The
Redskins Rule is a spurious relationship in which the results of National Football League (NFL) games correlated strongly with the results of subsequent United States presidential elections. Briefly stated, there was a high correlation between the outcome of the last Washington Redskins home football game prior to the U.S. presidential election and the outcome of the election: when the Redskins won, the party of the incumbent president retained the presidency; when the Redskins lost, the opposition party won. This coincidence was noted by many sports and political commentators, used as a bellwether to predict the results of elections, and held true in every election from 1940 through 2000. A variant of the Redskins Rule was contrived to maintain the correlation through the 2008 election (under the original formulation, it would have failed in 2004), after which it failed completely in the 2012 election, and later, the 2016 election.