Nate Silver sat down with Politico last night to discuss the general election between Trump and Hillary, giving his prediction on how likely it will be that Trump wins the election in November:
POLITICO – Nate Silver is giving Donald Trump a 19 percent chance of becoming president – and that makes him a little nervous, as well it should.
No, it’s not because he failed to predict Trump’s albino-swan victory in the Republican primaries (after nailing Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 wins when others were calling both tossups, or worse). It’s because he’s running with the pack, and that makes him suspect something’s a little off.
Silver was at the bar the night before sitting down for POLITICO’s “Off Message” podcast last week after releasing his general-election forecast showing Hillary Clinton as the prohibitive favorite — and Twitter was, more or less, agreeing with him. This made him happy-queasy, which, best I can tell, is Silver’s natural resting state.
“It makes me a little worried that nobody was like, ‘You are wrong,’” the former Times political sabermetrician and founder of fivethirtyeight.com told me just before we pushed the record button at his office across from New York’s Lincoln Center.
The truth is that 2016 is a paradoxical prediction year, with variables aplenty. On one hand, political demographics and Trump’s unwillingness to create (until recently) a nominally competent campaign seems to have set the result in the Democrats’ favor. On the other, the fact that a huge number of voters deeply dislike both candidates —and 20 percent of the electorate are currently opting for neither — increases volatility, especially if a third-party candidate like Libertarian Gary Johnson can sustain double digits nationwide.
“My gut is that there is going to be a fairly significant third- and fourth-party vote, and people under-voting the top of the ballot,” Silver said — and that’s why Clinton is leading recent polls with a modest 43 percent of the vote to Trump’s godawful 37 percent.
The unusually large number of undecideds and third-party voters this year threatens to throw off his model, Silver allowed: “That’s a big thing that we’re looking at.”
Here’s more on his prediction itself:
On June 29, Silver issued not one, but two forecasts that predicted a debacle for the presumptive GOP nominee: The first, relying solely on poll data, gave Trump a 19 percent shot at winning, with Clinton at 79 percent. (It was remarkably in line with Vegas odds and gut-feeling checks I’ve made. Two weeks earlier, I asked a senior Clinton campaign official for an estimate – and the person matchlessly blurted out “78 percent.”) A second “polls-plus” formula that weighs other factors, including the country’s all-important economic performance, put Trump at a better but still-crummy 26 percent chance.
It’s bad when the only man (I know of) to call the 2012 race correctly is only giving – at best – Trump a 26% chance of winning. I’m sure those numbers will continue to change as it is still early, but whether or not Trump can increase his odds remains to be seen.