Donald Trump may win the November 5 US election, renowned American pollster Nate Silver has said. Despite a neck-and-neck battle between the former US President and Vice-President Kamala Harris, Mr Silver said his "gut feeling" says Trump will emerge victorious. And then came the caveat. "But don't trust anyone's gut, even mine," he wrote in a New York Times op-ed.
His current model gives Trump, the Republican nominee, a 53.1 per cent chance of a second term in the White House.
“My gut says Donald Trump. And my guess is that it is true for many anxious Democrats,” he explained. However, with polling showing battleground states within a percentage point or two, Nate Silver stressed that the 2024 election is essentially a 50-50 race. “It's not that I'm inherently against intuition,” he wrote. “But a 50-50 forecast really does mean 50-50.”
Reflecting on past elections, Mr Silver pointed out that pollsters consistently underestimated Donald Trump's support due to “nonresponse bias” among his base. “It's not that Trump voters are lying to pollsters; it's that in 2016 and 2020, pollsters weren't reaching enough of them,” he observed, hinting that the same could happen this year.
One key indicator of a possible Trump victory, according to Mr Silver, is the narrowing gap in party identification. “Democrats no longer have a consistent edge in party identification – about as many people now identify as Republicans,” he added, suggesting this could sway the election in Trump's favour.
While discussing Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, he suggested that pollsters might be so focused on accurately measuring Trump's support that they could unintentionally disadvantage Harris in their surveys. He criticised a common practice of weighing surveys based on who voters claimed to have supported in 2020.
“People often misremember or misstate whom they voted for and are more likely to say they voted for the winner (in 2020, Mr Biden),” Mr Silver wrote. He explained that this could lead to a polling bias against Harris, as some Trump voters may falsely claim to have voted for Biden in the previous election.
Mr Silver also raised concerns that pollsters may be overcorrecting for mistakes made in 2020, which he partly attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic. “Democrats were more likely to stay at home and therefore had more time on their hands to answer phone calls. If pollsters are correcting for what was a once-in-a-century occurrence, they may be overdoing it this time,” he warned.
The latest RealClearPolitics polling aggregate shows Harris leading Trump by a slander 1.1 per cent margin in the national popular vote. However, their “no toss-up map” suggests that Trump could sweep all seven swing states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Nate Silver, who has tracked the last five presidential elections, first rose to prominence with his accurate prediction of Barack Obama's win over John McCain in 2008.
