How the Dodgers World Series win could predict the presidential election

The Los Angeles Dodgers won the World Series Wednesday night, and it could be a predictor for who will be the next president.

While the election results will be decided by voters on Nov. 5, the last time the team won the World Series, former President Donald Trump also lost the election. On Wednesday night, the Dodgers clinched the final series against the New York Yankees. In 2020, the Dodgers beat the Rays at the end of a Covid-19 shortened season, a week before Trump was defeated by President Joe Biden.

In 2016, the Dodgers were not in the World Series. The Chicago Cubs won against the Cleveland Guardians, who were then known as the Cleveland Indians.

Newsweek reached out to the Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris campaigns for comment.

The Dodgers won their second championship in the last five years on Wednesday night in a 7-6 game. It marked their eighth championship in franchise history.

Harris posted to X, formerly known as Twitter, congratulating the Dodgers on their win Wednesday night.

“Your dominant play this season brought joy to millions of fans around the world – including @SecondGentleman,” the Democratic nominee’s post reads.

The Dodger’s win is not the only potentially less conventional predictor of the presidential election when it comes to sports.

In football, the Redskins Rule is a correlation between the results of the Washington Redskins, now known as the Washington Commanders, and the election results. It was first noticed by an executive at a sports-data company ahead of the 2000 election.

The rule states that whenever the team “won their last home game prior to the presidential election, the incumbent party retained the White House, and whenever the Redskins lost their last home game prior to the election, the out-of-power party won the White House,” according to Steve Hirdt of Elias Sports Bureau in a 2012 interview with ESPN.

The rule held true in each election from 1940 to 2000, but in the Redskins’ last home game ahead of the 2004 election, the team lost 28-14 to the Green Bay Packers, and President George W. Bush won re-election.

Hirdt revised the rule, so that “when the popular vote winner does not win the election, the impact of the Redskins game on the subsequent presidential election gets flipped.” The “Redskins Rule 2.0” then has correctly predicted the outcome of every election since 1940, except those in 2012 and 2016.

On Sunday, Oct. 27, the Washington Commanders defeated the Chicago Bears in a 18-15 game.

Other oddball predictors of the election include the “old-fashioned straw poll” of how well each candidate’s cookie sells at Busken Bakery in Cincinnati, Ohio, which has aligned with the result of every election since 1984 – except for 2020, where Biden’s cookie sold less.

Nationally, poll aggregator FiveThirtyEight has Harris ahead on October 31 with a 1.4-point lead, taking 48 percent of the vote to Trump’s 46.7 percent.