Nate Silver Has to Know He's Going to Be Attacked for This Column
He’s been apt to cover all his bases in case his model blows up, but Nate Silver has done one thing: annoyed liberals to no end with these increasingly bearish models for Kamala Harris. Harris was in the driver’s seat for a few weeks, but the trendlines have changed. Trump now has a 52 percent chance of clinching 270 electoral votes. It got to the point where the Left was attacking Silver for not massaging their egos within the bubble. Even The New York Times was accused of being—get this—too Republican-leaning with some of their surveys. With the election less than two weeks away, Silver jotted down what his gut was telling him. His answer will be one where the Make America Great Again mantra returns to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
That’s right, Silver’s gut is saying Trump will win, but, in typical fashion, he also wrote reasons why Kamala could win and whether there will be polling errors masking deficiencies in the surveys (via NYT):
In an election where the seven battleground states are all polling within a percentage point or two, 50-50 is the only responsible forecast. Since the debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, that is more or less exactly where my model has had it.
Yet when I deliver this unsatisfying news, I inevitably get a question: “C’mon, Nate, what’s your gut say?”
So OK, I’ll tell you. My gut says Donald Trump. And my guess is that it is true for many anxious Democrats.
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. 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.
[…]
Instead, the likely problem is what pollsters call nonresponse bias. It’s not that Trump voters are lying to pollsters; it’s that in 2016 and 2020, pollsters weren’t reaching enough of them.
Nonresponse bias can be a hard problem to solve. Response rates to even the best telephone polls are in the single digits — in some sense, the people who choose to respond to polls are unusual. Trump supporters often have lower civic engagement and social trust, so they can be less inclined to complete a survey from a news organization. Pollsters are attempting to correct for this problem with increasingly aggressive data-massaging techniques, like weighting by educational attainment (college-educated voters are more likely to respond to surveys) or even by how people say they voted in the past. There’s no guarantee any of this will work.
If Mr. Trump does beat his polling, there will have been at least one clear sign of it: Democrats no longer have a consistent edge in party identification — about as many people now identify as Republicans.
[…]
A surprise in polling that underestimates Ms. Harris isn’t necessarily less likely than one for Mr. Trump. On average, polls miss by three or four points. If Ms. Harris does that, she will win by the largest margin in both the popular vote and the Electoral College since Mr. Obama in 2008.
Yeah, if there’s one constant thing, polling firms don’t underestimate the Democratic vote. The shy Trump voter is dead—everyone is wearing MAGA gear with gusto. However, the type of voter that could go undetected are the ones who are outwardly not fans of Donald Trump but will vote for him out of economic necessity; they know things were betting under him. They’re also concerned that Kamala doesn’t have the chops to do the job, which she has shown repeatedly. That sort of nuance is hard to gauge, but the most interesting is that for someone like Silver, who crunches numbers, for him to say outright that his gut tells him Trump will win says a lot. The subsequent paragraphs of him trying to cover his ass is also telling.
‘I think Trump will win, but don’t take my word for it. Also, polling can be off. And Kamala can still win.’
Take a gamble, Nate. From what you’ve seen, I’ll take the first part of your declaration more seriously than your closing argument while sprinting back into the bunker to avoid missiles from angry liberals. It’s almost a troll move: ‘Trump’s gonna win! Okay, gotta go.’
It’s a little funny, to be honest.
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