Polling guru rivaling ‘Nostradamus’ reveals ‘gut’ prediction on Trump or Harris winning
A top polling guru regarded as the equivalent to the ‘Nostradamus’ of US presidential elections has revealed what his gut tells him on if Kamala Harris or Donald Trump will win.
Nate Silver, a statistician and poker player who founded FiveThirtyEight, has been delivering daily polling averages and forecasts for the November election based on his model.
Experts and everyday voters have been turning to his Silver Bulletin presidential election forecast as one of the most trusted assessments of who the election is tipping in favor of.
It has even put him in direct debate with historian Allan Lichtman, who has been nicknamed ‘Nostradamus’ for correctly predicting nine of the 10 most recent presidential elections.
Lichtman about a month ago unveiled his pick based on keys informed by true-false question – not polls. He said Harris will win the election.
While Silver’s model can change with updates on a daily basis, he has now shared what his gut tells him.
‘I inevitably get a question: “C’mon, Nate, what’s your gut say?”’ he wrote in a guest essay published in The New York Times on Wednesday.
‘So OK, I’ll tell you. My gut says Donald Trump.
‘And my guess is that it is true for many anxious Democrats.’
Silver started his essay by reiterating that the seven battleground states – Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Nevada – are polling within one or two percentage points, so ’50-50 is the only responsible forecast’. And that has generally been the case since Harris and Trump debated last month.
He offered his gut feeling and asked readers to take it with a grain of salt.
‘I don’t think you should put any value whatsoever on anyone’s gut – including mine,’ Silver wrote.
‘Instead, you should resign yourself to the fact that a 50-50 forecast really does mean 50-50. And you should be open to the possibility that those forecasts are wrong, and that could be the case equally in the direction of Mr. Trump or Ms. Harris.’
He provided reasons that each candidate could beat their polls.
People whose gut feeling is that the former president will win often point to shy Trump voters, similar to ‘shy Tories’, which refers to British polls tending to underestimate the turnout of Conservatives.
‘But there’s not much evidence for the shy-voter theory – nor has there been any persistent tendency in elections worldwide for right-wing parties to outperform their polls,’ Silver noted.
He also referred to the shy Tories theory with an example from the UK in 2017, when the Tories seemed poised to sweep, but Conservatives lost the majority instead.
‘A surprise in polling that underestimates Ms. Harris isn’t necessarily less likely than one for Mr. Trump,’ Silver wrote.
His conclusion circled back to not putting too much weight on his gut answer.
‘Don’t be surprised if a relatively decisive win for one of the candidates is in the cards,’ he wrote. ‘Or if there are bigger shifts from 2020 than most people’s guts might tell them.’
Silver’s model correctly predicted that Trump would lose the 2020 election but incorrectly called it overwhelmingly in Hillary Clinton’s favor in 2016, when Trump won.
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