Pollster Nate Silver says his gut tells him Trump will win the election

While pollster Nate Silver announced last month that he would vote for Vice President Kamala Harris on November 5, his “gut feeling” tells him that former President Trump will win.

Silver set the scene in his new opinion piece by pointing out that Trump and Harris are neck and neck in several battleground states. But these numbers do not seem to satisfy observers who, in his opinion, often ask him for a clear answer.

“All right, I’ll tell you,” Silver wrote in the New York Times on Wednesday. “My gut feeling says Donald Trump. And I suspect that’s true for many concerned Democrats.”

He says his intuition is based in part on the idea of ​​response bias, and considers that pollsters aren't reaching enough Trump supporters.

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“Non-response bias can be a difficult problem to solve,” Silver wrote. “Even the best telephone surveys have response rates in the single digits – in some ways the people who choose to take surveys are unusual. Trump supporters often have lower levels of civic engagement and societal trust, so they may be less inclined to respond to a survey.” News organization poll.

“Pollsters are trying to address this problem through increasingly aggressive data collection techniques, such as weighting by educational attainment (college-educated voters are more likely to respond to polls) or even by how people say they have voted in the past. There is no guarantee any of this will work.

But Silver doesn't leave Democrats without hope. He suggests there is a way for Harris to “top the polls.”

“A surprise in polls that underestimates Ms. Harris is not necessarily less likely than one for Mr. Trump,” he wrote. “On average, polls are off by three or four points. If Ms. Harris can do that, she will win both the popular vote and the Electoral College by the largest margins since Mr. Obama in 2008.”

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Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at the vice president's residence in Washington, Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2024. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

Silver recently highlighted data that appeared to be “pretty negative” for Harris.

“There are now three recent, high-quality national polls showing Donald Trump in the lead — a difficult situation for Harris given Democrats' disadvantage in the Electoral College — and her lead in our national polling average has fallen to 1.7 points .” Silver wrote on his Substack. “National polls don't have that much of an impact on the model, and the race remains essentially back-and-forth, but it's not hard to imagine reasons why Trump could win.”

He pointed to a recent Fox News poll that shows this Trump over Harris in the presidential race 50% to 48%, a reversal from last month when Harris had a narrow lead. Silver also cited the TIPP tracking poll that showed Trump carrying Harris by a 2-point margin, 49% to 47%.

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Democratic strategist James Carville, meanwhile, said he was “confident” the election would go the other way.

A woman fills out a ballot during early voting in Maryland on Oct. 26, 2020, at a polling station at Morgan State University in Baltimore. (REUTERS/Hannah McKay)

“America, everything will be okay. Ms. Harris is elected as the next President of the United States. I’m sure of it,” he wrote in one New York Times column on Wednesday.

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Silver, who advised readers not to blindly rely on gut feeling, offered another possible outcome in his Times article: The pollsters could be wrong and this won't be a photo finish at all. With polling averages so close, he said, even a small systematic polling error like in 2016 or 2020 “could produce a comfortable election victory for Ms. Harris or Mr. Trump.”