“My gut says” former President Donald Trump will win the election, Nate Silver wrote Wednesday, with a warning not to trust “anyone’s gut” instinct.
Silver, a statistician, writer, and poker player, says the election remains a “50/50” coin flip, a characterization that many political experts argue is true with just 13 days until Election Day.
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Newsweek reported on Silver’s history of predicting elections:
- 2008: Nate Silver successfully predicted the winner in 49 out of 50 states in the presidential election.
- 2012: He correctly predicted the winner in all 50 states.
- 2016: Although Donald Trump won in an upset, Silver’s model gave Trump the highest chance of winning (about 30%) compared to most other forecasters, who largely dismissed Trump’s chances.
- 2020: Silver’s model favored Joe Biden, which aligned with the final outcome, though it underestimated Trump’s performance in certain states like Florida.
In a New York Times op-ed, Silver guessed Trump will win due to, in part, what pollsters call nonresponse bias. A nonresponse bias is a pollster’s inability to reach enough supporters of Trump.
Silver also suggested Trump will win because he believes, without evidence, that many in the electorate are misogynists. Fifty-four percent of the nation say they are ready for a woman president, while only 30 percent said they are not, according to a recent YouGov poll.
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C-SPAN
Silver explained his reasoning:
Nonresponse bias can be a hard problem to solve. Response rates to even the best telephone polls are in the single digits — in some sense, the people who choose to respond to polls are unusual. Trump supporters often have lower civic engagement and social trust, so they can be less inclined to complete a survey from a news organization. Pollsters are attempting to correct for this problem with increasingly aggressive data-massaging techniques, like weighing by educational attainment (college-educated voters are more likely to respond to surveys) or even by how people say they voted in the past. There’s no guarantee any of this will work.
If Mr. Trump does beat his polling, 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.
There’s also the fact that Ms. Harris is running to become the first female president and the second Black one. The so-called Bradley effect — named after former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, who underperformed his polls in the 1982 California governor’s race, for the supposed tendency of voters to say they’re undecided rather than admit they won’t vote for a Black candidate — wasn’t a problem for Barack Obama in 2008 or 2012. Still, the only other time a woman was her party’s nominee, undecided voters tilted heavily against her. So perhaps Ms. Harris should have some concerns about a “Hillary effect.”
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.
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