Donald Trump is going to win the election, America’s top pollster has said.
Nate Silver, the prominent statistician and writer, has said that his “gut” tells him the Republican candidate will be returned to the White House on Nov 5.
“My gut says Donald Trump. And my guess is that it is true for many anxious Democrats,” he wrote in The New York Times.
His prediction comes amid growing fears among Democrats that the race is slipping away from Kamala Harris. One strategist said the party should not be feeling even “slightly optimistic” about the vice-president’s prospects.
Mr Silver, 46, has forecast the outcome of most US elections over the past decade and a half and is one of the only polling experts to have predicted Trump’s victory in 2016,
Explaining his prediction, the founder of FiveThirtyEight, the popular politics, economics and sports stats website, said that Trump has overcome the odds before.
“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,” he said.
Recency bias is a form of memory distortion that favours recent events over historic ones.
However, the polling guru dismissed the notion that “shy” Trump voters, those that don’t vocally support him but do privately, will swing the election for the former Republican president.
Instead he said pollsters were failing to reach Trump voters, therefore underestimating the true scale of his support.
“The likely problem is what pollsters call nonresponse bias. It’s not that Trump voters are lying to pollsters; it’s that in 2016 and 2020, pollsters weren’t reaching enough of them,” he said.
Democrat campaign strategists are now privately admitting that Ms Harris is losing ground to Trump in the polls, particularly in Wisconsin and Michigan, as election day looms.
“Everyone keeps saying, ‘It’s close.’ Yes, it’s close, but are things trending our way? No. And no one wants to openly admit that,” one Democratic strategist told The Hill.
They continued: “Could we still win? Maybe. Should anyone be even slightly optimistic right now? No.”
Mr Silver said that the vice-president, who is running to become the first female president, risks falling foul of the “Hillary effect”. “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’,” he said.
Despite the polls showing the two candidates are neck and neck, Mr Silver encouraged Americans to prepare for them to be wrong.
“According to my model, there’s about a 60 per cent chance that one candidate will sweep at least six of seven battleground states,” he said.
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