Famous polling guru Nate Silver shares his gut theory on who’ll win election
Polling guru Nate Silver says his gut tells him Donald Trump will retake the White House, despite forecasters consistently showing the race is a dead end.
Silver, the founder of the poll forecaster FiveThirtyEightwrote in the New York Times that concerns about a second Trump term are also “true for many concerned Democrats,” amid a dip in Kamala Harris’ momentum.
One of his main reasons was Trump’s tendency to underperform in the polls, as well as Silver’s model With the candidates separated by just 1.6 percent, the pollster said his “intuition” points toward the Republican.
Harris’ candidacy has also stalled in recent weeks as she faced her first round of combative interviews, partly due to her struggle to distance herself from Biden’s presidency.
Another recent one has seen this Reuters-Ipsos A poll showed that as many as 70 percent of registered voters said the country was on the wrong track, with the two candidates within the margin of error in the razor-close election.
Polling guru Nate Silver claims all of his models and predictions have a 50/50 dead heat situation for the presidential election, but this week came out with his “gut” prediction.
Silver said his “gut feeling” tells him Donald Trump will win the election, at a time when Kamala Harris has seen a dip in momentum
Silver’s own model (pictured) has the candidates almost evenly matched in the race, as he wrote this week that ’50-50 is the only responsible prediction’
In his piece, Silver emphasized that the election in three weeks will likely be incredibly close, with the outcome hinging on just a few battleground states.
This would be a far cry from the elections of recent years, where Joe Biden, for example, won the critical state of Wisconsin in 2020 by just 20,000 votes.
Silver said that in this home stretch, “the seven battleground states are all voting within a percentage point or two,” meaning “50-50 is the only responsible prediction.”
But Silver, a prodigious poker player and former professional, compared his “gut feeling” that Trump will win to the way intuition plays a big role in the game, even when the odds seem to be even.
“Most experienced players I’ve spoken to over the years will say it gives you something extra,” he wrote.
“You can never be sure, but your intuition can tilt the odds to 60-40 in your favor by picking up patterns of when a competitor is bluffing.”
With this in mind, Silver pointed to factors such as Trump’s tendency to underperform in polls, the struggle pollsters have in reaching his voters, and the surge of people registering as Republicans as reasons why he thinks the former president will win again.
Silver pointed to Trump’s tendency to underperform in the polls and the surge in voters registering as Republicans as reasons the former president could pull off a victory.
Silver also noted the historic nature of Harris’ candidacy, as she hopes to become the first female president and the second black president, feeling this could hurt her chances through an idea known as the “Bradley” effect’.
The term is named after former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, an African-American who lost the 1982 race for governor of California to George Deukmeijian, a white man, despite leading the polls.
It suggests that voters often tell pollsters they plan to vote for the historic candidate, or say they are undecided, rather than admitting they would not vote for a minority.
Silver argued that this has hurt countless candidates over the years, from Bradley to Hillary Clinton in 2016, when she was on the cusp of becoming the first female president, only for Trump to vastly exceed his polling numbers on Election Day.
Although the polling guru was shaky about his intuition pointing to Trump, he was more certain that the polls are unreliable for predicting elections.
He said pollsters are now forced to weight and manipulate their data to arrive at a result, such as taking into account whether respondents are registered voters or not, while arguing that “the new techniques pollsters are using could be overkill .’
This could lead to a surprise on election night – “that the election will not be a photo finish,” Silver predicted.
“With polling averages so close, even a small systematic polling error, like the one the industry experienced in 2016 or 2020, could deliver a comfortable Electoral College victory for Ms. Harris or Mr. Trump.
“According to my model, there is about a 60 percent chance that one candidate will defeat at least six of the seven battleground states.”