Data guru and the former head of the election analysis website FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver, has unveiled his 2024 presidential election model. Silver’s analysis suggests the 2024 election contest between the 81-year-old Democrat incumbent Joe Biden and former President Donald J. Trump isn’t a toss-up—with the model giving Trump an over 65 percent chance of winning in November.
At the heart of Silver’s notion that the election is no longer a toss-up but leans toward Trump is that while national polls show a close popular vote race, state polls show a race tilting away from Biden. He writes: “…if Biden loses Georgia, Arizona and Nevada — and he trails badly in each — he’ll need to win all three of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and not just one of them.”
He notes that while the three Rust Belt state electorates “are pretty heavily correlated, they aren’t perfectly correlated”—meaning sweeping all three is relatively difficult. ” In our simulations, Biden wins at least one of these states 54 percent of the time. But he wins all three of them in only 32 percent of simulations,” Silver contends.
Silver couches his model, noting that while there is an “[arbitrageable] difference between, say, a 50 percent chance of an event happening and a 60 percent chance,” even the probability of something happening at “a 60 percent chance nevertheless implies a high degree of uncertainty.” He goes on to explain that while the race remains close, it has reached a point where he no longer considers it a toss-up between the two candidates.
Interestingly, the former New York Times journalist and data scientist is refreshingly honest about how preference bias can impact election models—though he claims he has sought to avoid this to the extent he can. “The candidate who I honest-to-God think has a better chance (Trump) isn’t the candidate I’d rather have win (Biden),” Silver writes regarding his predictive model.
