Nate Silver, a statistician and the founder of polling aggregator FiveThirtyEight, has shared his thoughts on why it won’t be so easy for Vice President Kamala Harris to beat Donald Trump in the race to the White House.
In a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Thursday, he shared an article published by the New Republic, highlighting a portion that says Harris “should be trouncing Trump.”
The article, titled “Kamala Harris’s Momentum Is Gone,” discusses some of Trump’s more extreme policies, and reads: “He is, by every metric, more dangerous than he was when he left office four years ago. And yet, most polls show him having a roughly 50–50 chance of returning to the White House in January—which, understandably, has Democrats in a panic.”
In response, Silver wrote, “I get annoyed by claims like this because they use ‘should’ in the ‘ought’ sense of the is/ought distinction. The two prior Trump elections were close in the Electoral College. This one is, too. Maybe it ‘should’ be easy to trounce Trump, but it isn’t.”
Statistician and founder of FiveThirtyEight Nate Silver speaks at the Mackinac Policy Conference on Mackinac Island, Michigan on May 28, 2015. Silver recently posted on X about why it will be difficult for Kamala Harris to beat Donald Trump.
Tanya Moutzalias/Associated Press
Known for his predictions regarding the results of presidential elections, as well as his statistical models tracking the results of political polls, Silver went on to explain why he thinks this could be, writing, “And Harris probably faces a tougher environment than Clinton ’16 or Biden ’20. Incumbent parties around the world are struggling, cultural pendulum swinging conservative, inflation and immigration are big deals to voters, plus Biden f**cked up and should have quit sooner.”
Newsweek contacted a spokesperson for Harris for comment via email outside of business hours.
Silver recently said that to win the presidency, he believes Harris needs to gain the votes of the “roughly three percent of the remaining truly undecided voters” and gain the support of some of the “weird” voters.
Silver’s latest forecast predicts Trump’s victory, putting him ahead of Harris to win the presidency for the first time since September 19. It sees Trump maintaining a 50.2 percent chance of winning to Harris’ 49.5 percent chance.
The model does place Harris ahead in terms of the popular vote, with a 75 percent change of winning.
In Silver’s latest post on the Silver Bulletin website about Trump’s lead, he wrote that while these “small shifts” are not especially significant, as “life is full of arbitrary numerical thresholds.” He added that “the daily shifts have mostly worked in Trump’s favor.”
Do you have a story we should be covering? Do you have any questions about this article? Contact LiveNews@newsweek.com.
