NEW: Top Election Guru Makes Prediction In Presidential Race

Nate Silver — a statistician and election analyst who has emerged as one of the more reliable political forecasters over the past decade — wrote that he has a “gut feeling” that Trump will win the 2024 Election in just under two weeks.

Silver, who routinely updates his 2024 election model based on polling averages, media trends and a number of additional metrics, stressed that the election remains a “50/50” coin flip with early voting well underway.

“My gut says Donald Trump. And my guess is that it is true for many anxious Democrats,” Silver wrote in a recent op-ed for the New York Times.

I've got a guest essay out in the New York Times. Don't trust your gut. Your gut is useful for many things. But not for interpreting polling in the final 2 weeks of the election.https://t.co/50hfBIA1ul

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) October 23, 2024

(FOCUS GROUP: Do You Blame KAMALA or TRUMP for record inflation?)

“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.”

He went on to compare election forecasting to expert poker players who are able to tilt the odds in their favor based on experience. However, he also noted that presidential elections happen only once every few years, giving any forecaster far less data to work with regardless of expertise or experience in the field.

Silver is predicting a Trump victory based in part on what pollsters refer to as nonresponse bias. The term is used to reference pollsters who are unable to reach a certain number of a political candidate’s supporters, making the data they do collect more reliable.

“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,” he wrote.

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. There’s no guarantee any of this will work.

After noting that Republicans are enjoying voter registration leads in a number of states, he ultimately concluded that Kamala Harris will lose because of misogyny. “There’s also the fact that Ms. Harris is running to become the first female president and the second Black one. The so-called Bradley effect — named after former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, who underperformed his polls in the 1982 California governor’s race, for the supposed tendency of voters to say they’re undecided rather than admit they won’t vote for a Black candidate — wasn’t a problem for Barack Obama in 2008 or 2012,” Silver wrote.

Still, the only other time a woman was her party’s nominee, undecided voters tilted heavily against her. So perhaps Ms. Harris should have some concerns about a ‘Hillary effect.’

(The American Economy Is About To Burst. Prepare Now)