By Daily Mail (U.S.) | Created at 2024-10-23 12:37:32 | Updated at 2024-10-23 15:26:40
3 hours ago
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 heat.
Silver, the founder of polling predictor FiveThirtyEight, wrote in the New York Times that his fears over a second Trump term are also 'true for many anxious Democrats' amid a dip in Kamala Harris' momentum.
One of his main reasons was Trump's tendency to underperform in polls, and with Silver's own model showing the candidates just 1.6 percent apart, the pollster said his 'intuition' points to the Republican.
Harris' candidacy has also become bogged down in recent weeks as she faced her first set of combative interviews, in part due to her struggle to distance herself from the Biden presidency.
This has seen another recent Reuters-Ipsos poll finding that a staggering 70 percent of registered voters said the country was on the wrong track, while the two candidates placed within the margin of error in the razor-tight election.
Polling guru Nate Silver maintains that all his models and forecasts have the presidential election as a 50/50 dead heat, but offered his 'gut' prediction this week
Silver said his 'gut' 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 essentially tied in the race, as he wrote this week that '50-50 is the only responsible forecast'
In his piece, Silver stressed that the election in three weeks is looking likely to be incredibly close, with the result hinged on just a few battleground states.
This would be far from a departure from elections in recent years, with, for example, Joe Biden winning the critical state of Wisconsin by just 20,000 votes in 2020.
Silver said that in this home stretch, 'the seven battleground states are all polling within a percentage point or two,' meaning that '50-50 is the only responsible forecast.'
But Silver, a prodigious poker player and former professional, likened his 'gut feeling' that Trump will win to how intuition plays a big part in the game even when the odds appear to be even.
'Most of the expert players I have spoken with over the years will say it gives you a little something extra,' he wrote.
'You’re never certain, but your intuition might 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 in people registering as Republicans as reasons he thinks the former president will win again.
Silver pointed to Trump's tendency to underperform in polls and the surge in voters registering as Republican as reasons the former president may squeak out a win
Silver also noted the historic nature of Harris' candidacy as she hopes to become the first female president and second Black one, feeling this could hurt her chances through a notion known as the 'Bradley Effect.'
The notion is named for former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, an African American who lost the 1982 California governor's race to George Deukmeijian, a white man, despite leading the polls.
It proposes that voters often tell pollsters they intend to vote for the historic candidate or say they are undecided rather than admit they wouldn't vote for a minority.
Silver posited that this has hurt numerous candidates over the years, from Bradley to Hillary Clinton in 2016, when she appeared set to become the first female president only for Trump to massively overperform his polling on election day.
However, while the polling guru was shaky on his intuition pointing to Trump, he was more certain on the unreliability of polling to predict an election.
He said pollsters are now forced to weigh and manipulate their data to get a result, such as accounting for whether respondents are registered voters or not, as he argued that 'the new techniques that pollsters are applying could be overkill.'
This may result in a surprise on election night - 'that the election won't 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 produce a comfortable Electoral College victory for Ms. Harris or Mr. Trump.
'According to my model, there’s about a 60 percent chance that one candidate will sweep at least six of seven battleground states.'
