Election savant Nate Silver has put his marker down and revealed his “gut says” that former President Donald Trump will emerge victorious in the Nov. 5 election, while warning that polling data indicate the race could still go either way.
“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, whose model currently rates the Republican nominee with a 53.1% chance of becoming the 47th president, wrote in a New York Times op-ed published Tuesday.
“Yet when I deliver this unsatisfying news, I inevitably get a question: ‘C’mon, Nate, what’s your gut say?’” Silver went on. “So OK, I’ll tell you. My gut says Donald Trump. And my guess is that it is true for many anxious Democrats.”
Silver, 46, explained that surveys underestimated Trump’s performance in each of the last two elections because of “nonresponse bias” toward the 78-year-old’s 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,” he wrote.
Silver added that if Trump does defeat Vice President Kamala Harris next month, “there will have been at least one clear sign of it: Democrats no longer have a consistent edge in party identification — about as many people now identify as Republicans.”
In making the case for Harris, Silver suggested that pollsters may be so worried about properly measuring support for Trump that they’ll stack their surveys against the Democratic nominee.
The FiveThirtyEight founder took issue with one particular tactic, in which pollsters weigh their surveys based on whom people said they voted for in 2020.
“[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),” Silver explained.
“That could plausibly bias the polls against Ms. Harris because people who say they voted for Mr. Biden but actually voted for Mr. Trump will get flagged as new Trump voters when they aren’t.
“There’s also a credible case that 2020 polling errors were partly because of [COVID-19] restrictions,” he went on. “Democrats were more likely to stay at home and therefore had more time on their hands to answer phone calls. If pollsters are correcting for what was a once-in-a-century occurrence, they may be overdoing it this time.”
The latest RealClearPolitics aggregate has Harris with a head-to-head lead of 1.1% over Trump in the national popular vote.
The outlet’s so-called “no toss-up map” predicts that Trump will sweep all seven swing states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — to defeat Harris, 60.
Silver has tracked the last five presidential elections, beginning with Barack Obama’s victory over John McCain in 2008.
