Donald Trump’s post-convention polling-boost has made him a favorite to win the 2016 election if it were held today, according to Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com website on Monday.
The site gave him a 57.5 percent chance of winning the election if it was held today, leaving Hillary Clinton with a 42.5 percent chance of winning — and many progressives with splitting headaches.
TRUMP now leads in 538's now-cast, our estimate of what would happen in an election today. https://t.co/djsqNajFrh pic.twitter.com/7DvrdieHOw
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) July 25, 2016
Silver’s site combines many state polls and numerous computer -driven probability estimates to conjure up each candidate’s day-by-day chance of winning a pending election. But his probability results fluctuate wildly when a steady flow of imprecise polls show the race is neck-and-neck — and can greatly shift during the course of a long campaign.
One implication is that maybe you'll see bigger swings after conventions, debates, breaking news. But also means a small lead is less safe.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) July 25, 2016
So when Silver adjusted his software to offset Trump’s estimated convention bounce, he immediately put Clinton back in the favorite slot, with a 58.9 percent chance of winning the election — if it was held today.
CLINTON still leads in our polls-plus model, which adjusts for Trump's convention bounce. https://t.co/zo8rbYw56E pic.twitter.com/J0G2D5PHxK
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) July 25, 2016
Silver notes that Trump’s steady climb in the swing-state polls has pushed Clinton off her prior throne at the site, which was giving her an over whelming probability of winning earlier in the year.
*Before* the conventions, Trump had a 35-40% chance of winning, per our models. That's high! Race had already gotten much closer.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) July 25, 2016
Silver’s bad news about Trump’s breakthrough was largely ignored by progressive media outlets. For example, it was ignored at The Huffington Post, and got only a seven-paragraph treatment in Politico and six short paragraphs, plus a tweet, in TheHill.
It is also a big comedown for Silver, who dismissed Trump’s chances in August 2015.
At FiveThirtyEight, however, we’re fairly agnostic about what will happen to Trump’s polling in the near term. It’s possible that he’s already peaked — or that he’ll hold his support all the way through Iowa and New Hampshire, possibly even winning one or two early states, as similar candidates like Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich have in the past. Our emphatic prediction is simply that Trump will not win the nomination. It’s not even clear that he’s trying to do so.
That faulty prediction of Trump’s doom has angered many progressives now worried by Trump’s gains.
“Trump teeters on the verge of accepting our universe’s nod as GOP Chaos God,” according to a progressive writer at PasteMagazine.com, whose article is titled “The Sudden, Shocking Fall of Nate Silver.”
According to Silver, [Trump’s lead] should never have happened … Again and again, Silver told us Trump had no chance, none at all. Because Silver had gathered up all the broken pieces of pundithood and pasted them together in a madly correct prediction back in 2008 and 2012, we trusted Cassandra. But he was wrong, wrong, wrong.
The polling shift that has pushed up Trump’s victory chances can be seen at the RealClearPolitics.com average of polls. The polling average showed Trump leading Clinton by o.2 percentage points. This marks only the second time Trump was seen leading Clinton in the RCP average.
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