Nate Silver’s polling tracker now has Trump slightly favored to win (50.2%) the election. While this shift appears small, it has drawn attention because it pushes Trump just past the halfway mark in forecasts for winning the Electoral College.
Silver explains that while Trump’s rise over recent weeks is significant, and his polling model, is designed to minimize overreactions to new data to provide more accurate long-term predictions (i.e., it’s likely a “real” effect), this doesn’t in any way mean Trump “will” win, and the race remains highly competitive, especially in key states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, which are critical to determining the outcome.
Hopefully.
He makes a pretty convincing case for both the idea that “momentum” is kind of meaningless, but also that Trump slowly gaining for the last 30 days is not. Part of what pushed it over the line (Silver is quick to point out that 49.8 and 50.2 is basically meaningless like the difference between a 49th and 50th birthday; we like round numbers) is the Fox News poll.
As he demonstrates, there is no detectable right-wing bias in Fox News polling despite the obvious bias of their news reporting. I can’t speak to the others, but I’m not ready to dismiss all polls based on the political identification of the organization, if the polling is of high quality.
My gut tells me Trump is going to pull this out somehow. But, then again, my gut literally has shit for brains.
My personal opinion is that it’s going to be far closer than anyone is really comfortable with.
I mean, look at 2020… BOTH candidates got more votes than any other candidate in history. 74 million people out of 330 million voted for Trump. 22.4% of the entire population went “Yeah, he looks good!”
Reminds me of that comedy video with the dude in a hospital bed who can’t decide between having a surgeon or a clown do his life-saving surgery (spoiler: he chooses the clown because he’s something different and he felt hospitals need that).