LEXINGTON, Virginia (AFP) — As voting went on in South Carolina's Democratic primary contest, a group of US students with a knack for picking presidential candidates tipped Senator Hillary Clinton as the party's nominee for the White House.
"Hillary Clinton handily got the number of delegates she needed," Michael Fahey, a final year student at Washington and Lee University, told AFP.
"Bill Clinton called when the vote was announced and thanked us for choosing his wife."
The university has held a mock convention every four years since 1908 to choose the presidential candidate for the party that is not in the White House. In the past 60 years, the Washington and Lee convention has got it right every time except once.
That was in 1972, when the students chose Senator Edward Kennedy over George McGovern for the Democratic nomination.
This year, however, some were saying the students might be losing their touch.
They incorrectly tipped New York Senator Clinton to win the Iowa Democratic caucus -- her main rival for the nomination, Illinois Senator Barack Obama, did -- and followed that up by tipping Obama to win in New Hampshire, where Clinton won.
Fahey was unbowed by the students' off-the-mark predictions for the two opening nominating contests.
"So many people got New Hampshire and Iowa wrong, and, in any case, they're only two states," said Fahey.
"There's a tremendous amount of work that went into this prediction," he said, explaining how the students set up committees for the 50 states, plus Washington DC, Guam, the Virgin Islands, Samoa and Democrats Abroad, nearly two years ago.
"Each of the 55 states has a group of researchers, all drawn from the student body, who are responsible for following polls, talking to politicians in their state, and interacting with journalists and pundits to find out who they support," Fahey said.
"To me, the reason we get it right so often and probably will again is because of the amount of work and research we put into the prediction."
Ninety-five percent of the student body took part in this year's convention, more than in previous years when participation was marginally lower, at around 90 percent.
"The Democratic candidates, and especially Clinton and Barack Obama, have done an incredible job igniting young people's interest in this election and in politics," Fahey said.
As Washington and Lee chose Clinton, she was duking it out with Obama in the South Carolina Democratic primary, where Obama routed Clinton on Saturday, riding massive African-American support to a critical win in his bid to become the first black US president.
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