Famed polling expert Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight claimed his “gut” is telling him that former President Donald Trump will defeat Vice President Kamala Harris in the November 5 election.
“In an election where the seven battleground states are all polling within a percentage point or two, 50-50 is the only responsible forecast,” Silver wrote in a New York Times op-ed published Tuesday (October 22).
“Yet when I deliver this unsatisfying news, I inevitably get a question: ‘C’mon, Nate, what’s your gut say?’” he added. “So OK, I’ll tell you. My gut says Donald Trump. And my guess is that it is true for many anxious Democrats.”
Silver’s model currently has Trump with a 53.1% chance of being elected. The polling expert also claimed that other surveys underestimated Trump’s performance in the past two elections due to “nonresponse bias” toward his supporters.
“It’s not that Trump voters are lying to pollsters; it’s that in 2016 and 2020, pollsters weren’t reaching enough of them,” Silver wrote.
Silver also claimed that if Trump does defeat Harris next month, it will show a clear sign that “Democrats no longer have a consistent edge in party identification” as “about as many people now identify as Republicans.”
Silver did, however, acknowledge that pollsters may be so worried about properly measuring Trump’s support that they’ve stacked surveys against Harris.
“[P]eople often misremember or misstate whom they voted for and are more likely to say they voted for the winner (in 2020, Mr. Biden),” he explained.
Silver gained notoriety for successfully predicting 49 of 50 states in the 2008 presidential election, as well as former President Barack Obama‘s re-election win in 2012 and Biden’s win in the 2020 election. The pollster was, however, criticized for giving Hillary Clinton a 71.4% chance of winning over Trump after the former president 304 electoral college votes to win the election.
“I think people shouldn’t have been so surprised,” Silver told the Harvard Gazette in 2017. “Clinton was the favorite, but the polls showed, in our view, particularly at the end, a highly competitive race in the Electoral College. We had him with a 30 percent chance, and that’s a pretty likely occurrence. Why did people think it was much less than that? I think there are a few things.”
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