Statistician Nate Silver, a card-carrying liberal who does not want former President Donald Trump to win in November, conceded the general election is no longer a “toss-up.”
“I don’t want Trump to win the election, and I’d never consider voting for him,” the analyst wrote Wednesday in a forecast headlined “The presidential election isn’t a toss-up.”
“The candidate who I honest-to-God think has a better chance (Trump) isn’t the candidate I’d rather have win (Biden),” he added.
Having said that, Silver — who is perhaps best known for being part of the establishment media shills at FiveThirtyEight who grossly overestimated Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning the 2016 presidential election — predicts Trump has a 65.7 percent chance of victory over President Joe Biden, who has a 33.7 percent chance.
His forecast was based on 40,000 simulations run through a statistical model. It has Trump receiving 287 Electoral College votes versus 250 for Biden.
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In the popular vote, Biden has a narrow edge, with a projected win of 51 percent versus 49 percent for his GOP challenger.
This is astonishing (and astonishingly bad for Biden), given the current demographic makeup of the United States, which generally favors Democrats.
Nate Silver has published his first 2024 election model prediciton…
It gives Trump a 66% chance of winning.
In my opinion, Nate is the best mainstream election forecaster in the game. He’s also said many times that he personally does not want Trump to win. pic.twitter.com/OVzaT29cCb
— Geiger Capital (@Geiger_Capital) June 26, 2024
Are you voting for Trump?
In a long-winded analysis, Silver said Trump will likely win because of a confluence of key factors:
- Very high inflation.
- Concerns about Biden’s mental acuity.
- Global pessimism about the state of the world.
- Incumbents worldwide losing elections.
- Biden’s dismal approval ratings.
“There’s Biden’s age, which voters have extremely persistent concerns about,” Silver wrote.
“There’s the very high inflation of mid-2021 through mid-2023 — which has considerably abated, but still is reflected in much higher prices than when Biden took office.”
Since Biden took office: groceries up 20.7%, gasoline up 48%, energy up 38.4%, consumer prices up 19.4%, credit card debt up 44.8%. Real average hourly earnings are down 2.63%. #Bidenomics #Inflation
Sources: FactCheck, PolitiFact, Wisconsin Wa pic.twitter.com/Nc9BsMJCRg— 🇺🇸 Pismo 🇺🇸 (@Pismo_B) June 26, 2024
Silver continued: “There’s the fact that the global mood is pessimistic and that incumbents have been getting crushed everywhere around the world.”
“Biden has the lowest approval ratings of anyone running for re-election since either George H.W. Bush or Jimmy Carter, depending on how you squint at the numbers,” he further lamented.
Silver also noted that he wasn’t even bringing up some of the other issues hounding Biden: “The reasons he might lose are overdetermined. (I haven’t even mentioned things like immigration or the war in Gaza.)”
It’s sometimes useful to look at forecasts, but polls and predictions don’t win elections; fair elections do.
As long the potential for voter fraud goes unchecked, any election prediction is, to quote William Shakespeare, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
