Staff Reports
Nate Silver, the polling guru who has been wrong almost as often as he’s been right, is at it again with predictions for the upcoming presidential election. This time, he gives former President Donald Trump a 65.7% chance of claiming victory in November, handing President Joe Biden a meager 33.7% shot. There’s also a minuscule 0.5% chance of neither candidate reaching the magical 270 electoral votes. For context, that’s about the same likelihood as Kamala Harris making it through a speech without cackling.
Silver’s crystal ball also indicates that Biden has a 51% chance of winning the popular vote, which, as everyone who hasn’t been living under a rock since 2016 knows, means absolutely nothing when it comes to securing the Oval Office. Meanwhile, third-party candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is set to snag 4.3% of the popular vote, likely siphoning off votes from Biden’s base. Silver’s projections come from an elaborate exercise where he ran 40,000 simulations of the election, presumably because he had nothing better to do.
And when @NateSilver538 & @FrankLuntz are proven totally wrong again like they were using same models in 2018, 2020, 2022, 2023, (no red waves) can we once & for all STOP 🛑 listening to these 2? It’s exhausting. https://t.co/7WxAcdCcvI
— Here to re-tweet to get the Msg out, Vote BLUE💙 (@Scout20202) June 26, 2024
Curiously, this projection differs from what his own former brainchild, FiveThirtyEight, is saying. In a twist that you can’t make up, FiveThirtyEight gives Biden a slight edge over Trump with a 51% chance. That’s right, folks, you now have pollsters disagreeing with their own past selves. One can only wonder if there’s a split personality situation unfolding over there.
Silver himself seems perplexed by his own numbers. He openly admits he believes Trump has a better shot at winning but says he’d prefer if Biden took the win. His model, for better or worse, is based on the same methodology he used in 2020, with the slight tweak of factoring in third-party candidates and no longer assuming a pandemic-ridden year.
For those obsessing over national polls showing Biden leading by a whisker, Silver offers a reality check: if the Electoral College and popular vote gap mirrors anything like 2016 or 2020, Biden is in more trouble than a Hollywood liberal caught without a script. National polls might point to a slight Biden lead, but it’s the battleground states that matter, and Trump’s commanding the stage in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada.
