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Nate Silver, a notorious political statistician, wrote Wednesday that his “gut says” former President Donald Trump will win the election but cautioned against trusting gut instincts.
Silver, a statistician, stated the race remains a “50/50” coin flip, a view many political experts share with 13 days left until the 2024 presidential election, according to a Breitbart News report. In 2008, Silver correctly predicted 49 out of 50 states in the electoral breakdown. In 2012, he accurately predicted all 50 states. Then, in 2016, Silver’s model gave Trump a higher winning chance (30%) than most forecasters. In 2020, his model favored Biden.
In a New York Times op-ed, Nate Silver predicted Trump would win, partly due to nonresponse bias, where pollsters struggle to reach Trump supporters. Silver also claimed Trump’s victory might stem from underlying misogyny in the electorate, despite a YouGov poll showing 54% of Americans are ready for a woman president, with 30% opposing the idea.
He writes the following in his op-ed:
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.”
Famed polling guru Nate Silver’s ‘gut says Donald Trump’ will win 2024 presidential election https://t.co/ZAfB4VOnHy pic.twitter.com/yOPuaQ7l6T
— New York Post (@nypost) October 23, 2024
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