THE GUARDIAN, FIVETHIRTYEIGHT
Hillary Clinton has an 81% chance of winning the election to Donald Trump’s 19%, polling analyst Nate Silver said on Wednesday in his first model of the 2016 presidential election.
Silver’s calculations are based on a model that processes polling data exclusively. A second model produced by Silver’s FiveThirtyEight web site, taking in economics statistics and historical data, portrayed a slightly tighter race, at 74%-26% for Clinton.
Silver gained international fame for his perfect, 50-for-50 performance at predicting state outcomes in advance of the 2012 presidential election. Where many pundits saw a tight race between Republican nominee Mitt Romney and incumbent president Barack Obama, Silver correctly foresaw a 332-206 electoral college blowout.
Silver’s performance was almost as good in 2008, when he correctly predicted outcomes in 49 of 50 states, and predicted the popular vote margin to within a percentage point.
Since becoming a smash success in 2012, however, Silver and his FiveThirtyEight colleagues have suffered some high-profile misses that could lead some observers to discount their predictions this year. Their most high-profile miss of all: Donald Trump.
Last August, Silver rated Trump’s chances of winning the Republican nomination at 2%, and he remained bearish on Trump’s candidacy throughout the fall. The mistake, he has since admitted, sprang from a blindness to the very data he has made a career reading so well. The polls showing Trump’s strength were right; the nagging contextual information that Silver admitted he allowed get in the way – historical data, “gut” feelings about the candidate – was, in Trump’s unique case, highly misleading.
FiveThirtyEight has made other mistakes. In March a FiveThirtyEight model gave Clinton a 99% chance of winning the Michigan primary; Bernie Sanders won by a half-point. In the 2014 midterms, the site failed to anticipate a Republican wave that generated multiple upsets for its models. “The polls did have a strong bias this year,” Silver wrote afterward.
Apologists for Silver might point out that despite his mistaken calls, he has usually been right, and quite precisely right, especially when it comes to presidential elections, which is the topic of inquiry at hand.
Silver’s model is not out of line with recent national polling, which has given Clinton a lead of six or seven points, on average. The polls are not, however, uniform. A survey released on Wednesday by the reputable pollsters at Quinnipiac University depicted Clinton with only a two-point lead, 42-40.