‘Welp’: Nate Silver Astonished As Toss-Up Presidential Race Gets Even Tighter On Election Eve

Elections analyst Nate Silver expressed his astonishment that the presidential race had tightened even further on Monday in a one word post on X, formerly Twitter, that read “Welp.”

On Sunday, Silver declared the contest between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris a “pure toss up” as his model gave Trump a 51.5% chance and Harris a 48.1% chance of winning the White House.

Referencing gold standard pollster J. Ann Selzer’s shocking finding that Harris is ahead by three points in ruby red Iowa, Silver argued that “it clinches the case that there will be plenty of numbers from high-quality pollsters in the final batch of polls that support a Harris victory — along with roughly as many that imply a Trump win.”

“If Trump had ‘momentum’ in October, it has now petered out in November. And we will very likely go into Tuesday night with the race being truly a toss-up, not leaning or tilting toward Trump,” he added.

Over the course of the next day, however, Silver’s model somehow came to reflect an even tighter race that gave Trump a 50.4% chance of prevailing and Harris 49.2%.

On X, Silver summed up his thoughts with only a “Welp,” but on his Silver Bulletin Substack, he provided further thoughts on what is expected to be a historically close election.

“The model liked this update for Kamala Harris. I’m guessing it’s mostly because of this set of YouGov polls, which were good for Harris and from one of the more highly-rated pollsters to release data since our last update,” he observed. “Harris is in the strongest position in our forecast since Oct. 18. Obviously, it’s a toss-up, and you shouldn’t care too much about whether the final forecast is 51/49 one way or the other, but it remains genuinely uncertain who will have the nominal lead in our final model run, which is scheduled to post at around 12:30 a.m. tonight.”