A professor who says his unique model for predicting U.S. election results has a 96 per cent success rate says Donald Trump will likely be the next president.

Helmut Norpoth, a political science professor at Stony Brook University in New York, uses data from primary races to predict who will win the final vote.

He's applied his predictions model to elections dating back to 1912, and so far, he's only been wrong once: in 1960, when Democrat John F. Kennedy defeated Republican Richard Nixon.

Norpoth says he owes his 96 per cent success rate to a relatively simple formula.

"For each of these elections, you can take a look at what happens within the parties," he said. "A candidate who does better against the competition within his or her party beats the candidate of the other party."

For example, Norpoth said, Trump is currently leading in the Republican primaries. Without counting the results from Super Tuesday, the businessman-turned-candidate has dominated in races in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada.

Meanwhile, Norpoth said, the support of Democratic voters has been more evenly split between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.

As a result, Norpoth is projecting a Trump victory in the 2016 presidential election.

"Donald Trump is the stronger candidate, based on that metric, and that gives him the edge in the election," Norpoth said.

While other polls contradict Norpoth's predictions, the professor said it's too early for traditional polling to be accurate.

A recent CNN poll predicted a Democrat victory over Trump, regardless of whether Clinton or Sanders wins the party's nomination.

But Norpoth said polls tend to be inaccurate until closer to the final election date.

"I'm not worried much that a poll right now shows something else," he said.

Norpoth said the Super Tuesday results, so far, seem to confirm Trump's lead.

But if the controversial candidate doesn't win the Republican nomination, Norpoth said, that would change the playing field.

"If somebody else gets the nomination other than Donald Trump, in that case, any other Republican would do less well than Hillary Clinton," he said.