Famed polling expert Nate Silver makes Trump heavy favorite to beat Biden in November: ‘Not a toss-up’
There’s a clear front-runner in the 2024 presidential race, according to renowned election analyst and statistical guru Nate Silver.
The data maven unveiled his quadrennial model Wednesday and started off by giving former President Donald Trump a 65.7% chance of victory over President Biden on Nov. 5.
Silver’s current prediction, based on 40,000 simulations run through the model, predicts that Biden, 81, is likely to edge out Trump, 78, in the national popular vote by one-tenth of a percentage point (47.2% to 47.1%).
However, in the all-important Electoral College, Silver’s model has Trump receiving 287 electoral votes — just over the 270 needed to win the White House.
“The candidate who I honest-to-God think has a better chance (Trump) isn’t the candidate I’d rather have win (Biden),” Silver conceded in a blog post outlining his findings — headlined, “The presidential election isn’t a toss-up.”
“If the Electoral College/popular vote gap looks anything like it did in 2016 or 2020, you’d expect Biden to be in deep trouble if the popular vote is roughly tied,” he added.
The last Republican presidential candidate to win the popular vote was George W. Bush when he secured re-election in 2004.
The biggest problem facing the incumbent, according to Silver, is that Biden needs to run the table in the same battleground states he swept four years ago.
“[I]f Biden loses Georgia, Arizona and Nevada — and he trails badly in each — he’ll need to win all three of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania,” he wrote.
“In our simulations, Biden wins at least one of these states 54[%] of the time. But he wins all three of them in only 32[%] of simulations. This is the sort of precision that a model can provide that your intuition really can’t.”
Silver’s prediction puts him at odds with FiveThirtyEight, the company he founded and departed from last year, which currently gives Biden a 51% chance of emerging victorious.
Silver vaulted to national prominence during the 2008 presidential cycle when he predicted 49 of 50 states correctly that year.
Then, during the 2012 campaign, he correctly predicted Barack Obama was most likely to be re-elected despite claims from conservatives that his analysis was biased against Republican nominee Mitt Romney.
On Wednesday, he wrote that the 2024 race “looks a lot like 2012 in reverse, when national polls were often close but the swing state polls consistently favored Obama and gave him the far more robust map.”
Earlier this month, Silver issued a stark warning about Biden’s prospects, even musing about whether he should drop out of the race.
Also Wednesday, Trump surged ahead in a new Quinnipiac University poll of registered voters to take a 4 percentage-point lead over Biden, 49% to 45%.
In the same outlet’s poll last month, Biden led the 45th president by a single point, 48% to 47%.
In a six-way matchup, Trump’s lead widened to 6 points, 43% to 37%. Independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. notched 11%, Green Party hopeful Jill Stein and independent Cornel West each nabbed 2%, and Libertarian candidate Chase Oliver got 1%.
Quinnipiac’s poll also showed that 55% of voters felt Trump shouldn’t be thrown in prison due to his guilty verdict in the Manhattan “hush money” case, while 40% wanted him put behind bars.
The former president’s sentencing is slated for July 11.
When it came to first son Hunter Biden, 51% said he should be sentenced to prison on federal weapons charges, while 38% felt he shouldn’t.
Trump and Biden are set to square off in the first debate of the general election season Thursday in Atlanta.
Nearly three-quarters (73%) of voters claimed they would tune in, but few expressed willingness to be persuaded.
Just 13% of those supporting Biden, 12% of those behind Trump and 32% of those backing Kennedy said they were open to changing their voting preference due to the debate.
The poll was conducted June 20-24 among 1,405 registered voters, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.6 percentage points.
