Polling guru Nate Silver gives Donald Trump a 66% chance of winning presidential election
Silver's forecast model gives Trump a 65.7% chance to reach 270 electoral votes
Polling and data guru Nate Silver revealed former President Trump was solidly favored to win the White House in his first presidential election forecast on Wednesday.
“The candidate who I honest-to-God think has a better chance (Trump) isn’t the candidate I’d rather have win (Biden),” Silver, who formerly ran polling analysis website FiveThirtyEight, wrote in his “Silver Bulletin” substack.
Silver’s forecast model, based on 40,000 simulations, found Trump had a 65.7% of winning the electoral college, compared to Biden, who had a 33.7% chance. However, Biden is slightly favored to win the popular vote. Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 but won the presidency with a slew of narrow swing state wins.
“If the Electoral College/popular vote gap looks anything like it did in 2016 or 2020, you’d expect Biden to be in deep trouble if the popular vote is roughly tied,” Silver wrote.
President Biden, left, and former President Trump. (Getty Images)
Silver noted that his model adjusts “for whether polls are conducted among registered or likely voters, the presence or absence of [Robert F. Kennedy] Jr., and house effects,” and added that his polling averages “weight more reliable polls more heavily.”
The data expert wrote that there was still time for Biden to turn things around and suggested the president give the nomination to Vice President Harris or someone else at the Democratic convention. However, he wrote, “Disclaimer: that also might be a terrible idea.”
“And he’s really not that far behind,” Silver wrote of Biden. “But the race isn’t a toss-up. That’s at best a white lie — a convenient fiction that allows everyone to shirk accountability for their forecasts and their decisions.”
Nate Silver, statistician, author and founder of FiveThirtyEight, speaks onstage at the ABC Leadership Breakfast panel during Advertising Week 2015 AWXII at the Bryant Park Grill in New York City on Sept. 28, 2015. (Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images for AWXII)
Silver was acclaimed in 2012 for correctly picking the winner of every state between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney and confidently forecasting an Obama victory. He was bullish on Hillary Clinton in 2016 but cautioned Trump had a reasonable chance.
In 2020, FiveThirtyEight’s model gave Biden nearly a 90% chance of winning the presidency on the eve of the election.
Silver said earlier this month that the Democratic Party would have been “better served” if Biden decided not to seek a second term.
“Biden just hit a new all-time low in approval (37.4%) at 538 yesterday. Dropping out would be a big risk. But there’s some threshold below which continuing to run is a bigger risk. Are we there yet? I don’t know. But it’s more than fair to ask,” Silver posted on June 10.
