Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight Gives Joe Biden a 71 Percent Chance of Beating Trump
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Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight gave 2020 Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden a 71 percent chance of beating President Donald Trump in its first forecast since Kamala Harris was announced as Biden’s running mate, Wednesday.
The forecast currently gives Biden a 71 percent chance of winning the 2020 presidential election, with Trump at just 29 percent.
“While it’s clear that Biden is comfortably ahead of Trump right now — nationally and in most battleground states — the forecast shows Trump with a meaningful chance of winning because there’s still plenty of time for the race to tighten,” FiveThirtyEight observed, before adding, “But wait! Should you even trust the polls?”
“Hillary Clinton led in the polls in 2016, right? Yes. But Clinton had only a small advantage in most surveys — Trump’s win was well within the range of normal polling error,” the site claimed, explaining “Biden’s lead over Trump has already topped Clinton’s post-convention peak,” and “Biden also enjoys more overall support than Clinton.”
The 2016 presidential election became infamous for the polls predicting a large victory for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton right up until the very end, and many outlets published retrospectives on how pollsters got it so wrong.
On November 8th 2016, FiveThirtyEight placed Clinton’s chance of winning at 71.4 percent against Trump’s chance of 28.6 percent — an eerily similar prediction to FiveThirtyEight’s current Biden forecast.
“If you followed the presidential polls at all closely, chances are that you expected Hillary Clinton to win last week. So did all of the major prediction models that use polls to game out election outcome probabilities,” wrote NPR following the election. “So perhaps everyone should have expected that in a year when all political norms were broken, the polls that the political world fixates upon would also prove to be flawed.”
