Polling data guru Nate Silver, often trashed for his worst predictions, on Wednesday declared Donald Trump to be the overwhelming favorite to beat President Joe Biden come November.
“The presidential election isn’t a toss-up,” Silver declared on social media—despite the growing consensus of a close race.
Meanwhile, the data site founded by Silver—which he recently exited—doesn’t seem to agree with his model at all: FiveThirtyEight forecasts the race as a “pure toss-up,” with Biden being slight favorite at 51 percent to Trump’s 49 percent, according to current polling. In fact, Biden is “favored to win in 509 out of 1,000 of our model’s simulations,” wrote the site’s editorial director, G. Elliott Morris.
“The rising national tide has lifted Biden’s boat in Michigan and Wisconsin… though Trump still edges him out in Pennsylvania,” Morris explained. “Our model’s current estimate of the gap between the winning candidate’s margin nationally and in the Electoral College is currently D+1.4 points—meaning Biden needs to win the national popular vote by 1.4 points to be favored to win a majority of electoral votes.”
