Nate Silver Reveals What His Gut Says About the Election

Famed left-leaning pollster Nate Silver is making a prediction based on his “gut” on what's going to happen in the election coming in less than two weeks.

"In an election where the seven battleground states are all polling within a percentage point or two, 50-50 is the only responsible forecast," he wrote. "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?'" he continued. "So OK, I’ll tell you. My gut says Donald Trump. And my guess is that it is true for many anxious Democrats."

Always careful to ensure that his liberal readers don't freak out, Silver quickly warned against relying too much on gut instincts in a race this critical.

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.

It’s not that I’m inherently against intuition. In poker, for example, it plays a large role. Most of the expert players I have spoken with over the years will say it gives you a little something extra. You’re never certain, but your intuition might tilt the odds to 60-40 in your favor by picking up patterns of when a competitor is bluffing.

But poker players base that little something on thousands of hands of experience. There are presidential elections only every four years. When asked who will win, most people say Mr. Trump because of recency bias — he won in 2016, when he wasn’t expected to, and then almost won in 2020 despite being well behind in the polls. But we might not remember 2012, when Barack Obama not only won but beat his polls. It’s extremely hard to predict the direction of polling errors.

Silver believes that Donald Trump is likely to beat the polls. Though he dismisses the "shy Trump voter" theory, he does believe in nonresponse bias.

"The likely problem is what pollsters call nonresponse bias," he says. "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 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.

Silver says two key factors could play a role in a potential Trump victory. First, Democrats have lost their consistent advantage in party identification, with as many people now identifying as Republicans. Second, Kamala Harris, running as the first female president and the second black president, faces a possible “Hillary effect,” where undecided voters may break against her. 

It should be noted that he also suggests that a polling surprise in favor of Harris is just as plausible as one for Trump. He explains that polls often miss by three or four points, and if Harris outperforms by that margin, she could win decisively. One potential reason for such an upset could be pollsters making overcorrections out of fear of underestimating Trump again.

In the end, the only poll that matters is the one that takes place at the ballot box on Election Day. No one can know for sure what's going to happen, so you can't let good news lull you into a sense of complacency.