Polling data expert Nate Silver predicted that Republican Donald Trump has a 10 percent greater chance than Democrat Kamala Harris of winning the Electoral College vote in Tuesday’s election.
On his “Risky Business” podcast with co-host Maria Konnikova posted Wednesday, he revealed that he does not put too much weight in polls coming out during the last week of the campaign, alleging many pollsters cheat to obtain their desired numbers.
He prefaced his overall forecast saying, “It’s still approximately a 50-50 race.”
“It’s basically 55-45 Trump or 54-45, with a small chance of a tie,” Silver explained with regards to the Electoral College vote.
“It’s been a little weird. I mean look, it’s gradually drifted to Trump over a fairly long period now. Two out of every three days Harris has lost ground in the forecast since roughly early October,” he said.
WARNING: The following video contains vulgar language that may offend some readers.
In his online forecast update published on Friday, Silver wrote that the race had tightened in his model, slightly.
“Good update for Harris with some strong polling for her in the Blue Wall states. Not much sign of a last-minute swing in the race,” he wrote, predicting Trump has a 53.8 percent chance of winning the Electoral College to Harris’ 45.8 percent, according to his modeling.
NEW Nate Silver 2024 election forecast update
🔴 Trump: 53.8%
🔵 Harris: 45.8%“Good update for Harris with some strong polling for her in the Blue Wall states. Not much sign of a last-minute swing in the race. We are likely locked into something roughly in the toss-up range.” pic.twitter.com/8jFmbsngJE
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) November 1, 2024
During his podcast, Silver said, “I don’t think we’re going to learn very much in this last week of the polling. In fact, I kind of trust pollsters less.”
“They all, every time a pollster [says], ‘Oh, every state is just +1, every single state’s a tie,’ No! You’re f***ing herding! You’re cheating,” he argued.
Herding involves polling firms adjusting their results to other pollsters’ findings so as to not be too much of an outlier, according to the American Association for Public Opinion Research.
The danger is that all the firms then end up collectively biasing their results in a way that does not match reality among the voting public.
We ran the numbers. Even if all 7 swing states are actually tied, there’s only a ~1 in 9.5 trillion chance~ that so many polls would show such a close race. 🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑 pic.twitter.com/X131aHveRR
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 1, 2024
“Your numbers aren’t all going to come out at exactly 1-point leads when you’re sampling 800 people over dozens of surveys. You are lying! You’re putting your f***ing finger on the scale!” Silver asserted. “I will not name names, but some pollsters are really bad about this.”
Are the mainstream pollsters cheating?
“If a pollster never publishes any numbers that surprise you, then it has no value,” Silver contended.
With that preface, he noted that the presidential candidates appear to be within one percentage point or less of each other in the swing states, with Arizona being an outlier, where Trump has taken an over 2-point lead.
Trump also appears to have a similarly stronger lead in Georgia, where the Real Clear Polling average has him up 2.6 percent.
Overall Silver reiterated that the race is essentially a tie and encouraged everyone to get out and vote.
In 2020, Silver’s model strongly favored Joe Biden to defeat Trump giving the Democrat an 89 percent chance.
However, in 2016 he also predicted Hillary Clinton would beat Trump, giving her a 71.4 percent chance to his 28.6 percent.
Silver did not think the Republican would likely win the Blue Wall states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, nor North Carolina or Florida.
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