The liberal pollster Nate Silver is putting Joe Biden’s chances of winning back the presidency as low as 28 percent following his disastrous debate performance last month.
Silver, the creator of FiveThirtyEight who cemented his reputation as one of the country’s leading pollsters after correctly predicting 49 out of 50 states in the 2008 presidential election and all 50 states in the 2012 presidential election, wrote in his Substack that Biden’s chances of coming out victorious are decreasing by the day.
He explained:
If Biden does drop out, the model should work fine: we’ll wait what I’m guessing will be about two weeks until there’s enough polling to benchmark how his replacement is faring, and then turn it back on. (Although I’m sure it would get a lot of clicks, I’d think it would be pretty irresponsible to publish a forecast of an alternative candidate’s prospects before then.
In some ways, though, I’m less worried about what our model would assume about, say, Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee — and more worried about whether it’s appropriately handling Biden.
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Even though Biden’s chances have fallen considerably in our forecast — to 28 percent now from 35 percent before the debate — it’s still probably too optimistic. He likely isn’t capable of providing the sort of performance he needs to fully realize his chances of a comeback.
However, Silver has not always got his predictions in right. Back in 2016, he gave Hillary Clinton a 72 precent chance of winning the presidential election and projected that Donald Trump would win just 236 electoral votes.
Needless to say, he was pretty wide of the mark.
