Nate Silver: ‘My gut says’ Trump will win

Veteran pollster Nate Silver said his “gut” right now is that former President Trump will win the election in less than two weeks, but he cautioned against putting faith in anyone’s gut feeling. 

Silver wrote in a guest essay published Wednesday by The New York Times that calling the race a 50-50 toss-up is the “only responsible forecast,” with polls showing the race as razor-tight in all seven key battleground states that are likely to determine the outcome. But, the 538 founder added, if people press him to give an answer on who is favored, he will say Trump. 

“My gut says Donald Trump. And my guess is that it is true for many anxious Democrats,” Silver said. “But I don’t think you should put any value whatsoever on anyone’s gut — including mine.” 

“Instead, you should resign yourself to the fact that a 50-50 forecast really does mean 50-50,” he continued. “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.”

While the race has remained mostly neck and neck between Trump and Vice President Harris, the GOP nominee’s chances have seemed to tick up in recent days. He became slightly favored in The Hill/Decision Desk HQ’s forecast for the first time Sunday and has closed in on a polling deficit that he had in swing states including Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

Silver noted, however, that polling errors could impact the result, and predicting which direction they will go is not easy. Trump memorably outperformed expectations in 2016 and even more so in 2020, but the pollster explained that in the 2012 election, then-President Obama won and outperformed in the polls.

He also laid out possible reasons why Trump or Harris may outperform what surveys have shown.

For the former president, Silver cast doubt against the theory of the “shy Trump voter” — that his supporters don’t want to publicly admit they are backing him. Not much data exists to support that phenomenon occurring in the past. 

Instead, the difficulty was in not reaching Trump supporters enough to gain an accurate measure of his support, Silver added.

“Pollsters are attempting to correct for this problem with increasingly aggressive data-massaging techniques, like weighing by educational attainment (college-educated voters are more likely to respond to surveys) or even by how people say they voted in the past,” he said. “There’s no guarantee any of this will work.”

For the Democratic nominee, Silver said pollsters’ response to their misses in 2016 and 2020 could cause them to make certain assumptions that favor Trump and overcorrect for the past issue. He also notes that 2020 was a unique year with the COVID-19 pandemic, making Democrats more likely to stay at home and be around to answer polls. 

“If pollsters are correcting for what was a once-in-a-century occurrence, they may be overdoing it this time,” he said. 

Silver added that a slight error could lead to a much more comfortable win for either candidate than expected. 

“Don’t be surprised if a relatively decisive win for one of the candidates is in the cards — or if there are bigger shifts from 2020 than most people’s guts might tell them,” he wrote.