Nate Silver's first general election prediction for 2016

Dafinch · Jun 30, 2016

538 launches first general election forecast 2016: Hillary 353 EVs to 183 Trump. 81% chance of win.

By floridageorge
Wednesday Jun 29, 2016 · 3:06 PM PDT

Read it and weep, Righty bitches!

538 just published its first general election projection for 2016.
538 Election Forecast
This is the starting point, folks. We are looking at 353 EVs for Hillary and 183 for Trump, with 270 EVs needed for the win. Also, odds of winning based on the EV projections of 80.6%. This can change up or down, nothing is in stone. But it is a good point from which to start the general election campaign in earnest. And, NO complacency allowed. GOTV efforts or registration drives should move on without regard to current polls or projections.

As you can see from the graph, 538 gives Florida to Hillary, also Arizona and North Carolina.

The odds were closer to 60% to 40% earlier in the month. Now it is a whopping 80.6% to 19.3%. Got to like that momentum and trajectory, with 130 days left to go.
All about the electoral votes:

The different scenarios, other than the topline, offered up in this computer model:

It’s worth noting that in 2008 Nate Silver got 49 states correct, and in 2012 his computer model got 50 states correct, the best prognosticator of them all.

Silver’s appearance on GMA announcing a slightly lower Hillary win percentage, likely because the series of Ballotpedia polls hadn’t been incorporated into the model yet.

superbeets · Jun 30, 2016

Donald Trump has a 20 to 25 per cent chance of winning the presidency, Nate Silver predicts

The polling analyst warned that Mr Trump has 'a real chance', but Hillary Clinton is 'a fairly clear favourite'

Tim Walker US Correspondent
@timwalker
5 hours ago

Nate Silver, the polling whizz who correctly predicted the result in all 50 US states at the 2012 presidential election, has said Hillary Clinton stands a 75 to 80 per cent chance of winning this year’s race to the White House.
Unveiling its much-anticipated polling model for the 2016 presidential election on Wednesday, Mr Silver’s FiveThirtyEight website published two separate forecasts: one based solely on polls, and a second that also takes into account the economy and historical data. The first currently puts Donald Trump’s chances of victory at just 20.4 per cent, the second puts the probability of the Republican billionaire clinching victory in November at approximately 26 per cent.

Mr Silver not only predicted the outcomes in all 50 states in 2012, but also correctly forecast 49 out of 50 states at the 2008 election, and projected a popular vote margin between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain that was within one per cent of the ultimate result.
FiveThirtyEight’s 2016 election model, Mr Silver wrote in a blog post, is “mostly the same” as the one used in the past two presidential elections. “Trump faces longer odds and a bigger polling deficit than John McCain and Mitt Romney did at the same point in their respective races,” he added.
Calling the 2016 race correctly would be considered a kind of redemption for Mr Silver, who failed to accurately predict Mr Trump’s rise to the top of the Republican ticket. In August 2015, he put the property mogul’s chances of securing the nomination at a mere two per cent, later admitting that he ought to have paid more attention to the polls themselves, and less to historical data and personal assumptions.

The 2016 model includes deep dives into polls from all 50 states, and gives Ms Clinton a good chance of winning in key swing states such as Florida and Pennsylvania. At present, the forecast even favours her marginally in Arizona, which has not voted for a Democrat since 1996. A win there, Mr Silver wrote, could help Ms Clinton gain a majority in the electoral college “based on Western or heavily Hispanic states, even if she loses much of the industrial Midwest.”

Cautioning readers not to take Ms Clinton’s victory for granted, Mr Silver concluded: “A 20 per cent or 25 per cent chance of Trump winning is an awfully long way from 2 per cent, or 0.02 per cent. It’s a real chance… But the polls establish Clinton as a fairly clear favourite. And in contrast to almost everything else this election cycle, the polls have mostly been right so far.”

Willie99 · Jun 30, 2016

yo Nate, if the polls have been mostly right this election cycle (your words), then why have you been mostly wrong?

thanks for playing

SheriffJoe · Jun 30, 2016

Nate Silver: 5% chance of Trump winning the nomination

Those are vtard-like numbers.

@)

Dafinch · Jun 30, 2016

Willie99 said:
yo Nate, if the polls have been mostly right this election cycle (your words), then why have you been mostly wrong?

thanks for playing

How exactly has he been "mostly wrong" in this cycle, Scumbag? SHOW us, don't just talk outta your ass like you always do. And even if you could show that is the case, which I doubt, his record in the past 2 Presidential records, plus several non Presidential contests, would dwarf any results in one Presidential primary campaign. And, btw, what's YOUR record in recent elections, Jagoff?

vitterd · Jun 30, 2016

Dafinch said:
How exactly has he been "mostly wrong" in this cycle, Scumbag? SHOW us, don't just talk outta your ass like you always do. And even if you could show that is the case, which I doubt, his record in the past 2 Presidential records, plus several non Presidential contests, would dwarf any results in one Presidential primary campaign. And, btw, what's YOUR record in recent elections, Jagoff?

Willie has been wrong about every election.....and he didn't "just miss"on his predictions.....he missed by a mile. But clueless Willie will just keep yapping because he doesn't know any better. Willie and sheriff Joe are o-fer

The Guesser · Jun 30, 2016

vitterd said:
Willie has been wrong about every election.....and he didn't "just miss"on his predictions.....he missed by a mile. But clueless Willie will just keep yapping because he doesn't know any better. Willie and sheriff Joe are o-fer

Everyone who likes $$$$ eagerly await Wrong Way and Casper making their Official Predictions on the 2016 race. There is no stronger indicator of which way to bet. Even Nate Silver's numbers pale in comparison to the reliability of these always Wrong idiots.

vitterd · Jun 30, 2016

The Guesser said:
Everyone who likes $$$$ eagerly await Wrong Way and Casper making their Official Predictions on the 2016 race. There is no stronger indicator of which way to bet. Even Nate Silver's numbers pale in comparison to the reliability of these always Wrong idiots.

Willie knows better than to make another prediction. He's just bashing pollsters now without making a call. Good thinking on his part. He's embarrased himself enough this past month. A failure as a tax preparer as Franco C told us.

Con man Joe is still sulking because lying Ted suffered a massive defeat. But people are eagerly anticipating his prediction.

GasMan · Jun 30, 2016

This just in....

Ben Carson still practicing Neurosurgery...

The Guesser · Jun 30, 2016

Gas Man said:
This just in....

Ben Carson still practicing Neurosurgery...

Actually he's not, he's retired. But this just in, you are still a sick Anti Semitic and Islamophobic racist.

LENBO · Jun 30, 2016

Gas Man said:
This just in....

Ben Carson still practicing Neurosurgery...

You think he accepts Obamacare ?

GasMan · Jun 30, 2016

The Guesser said:
Actually he's not, he's retired. But this just in, you are still a sick Anti Semitic and Islamophobic racist.

Whats that you Jew traitor Islam loving Christian hater?

busterhyman · Jul 1, 2016

accept obumacare- doesn't everybody

superbeets · Jul 1, 2016

[h=6]- JUNE 30, 2016 -[/h][h=1]WHITE HOUSE WATCH: TRUMP 43%, CLINTON 39%[/h]Rasmussen Reports
The tables have turned in this week’s White House Watch as Donald Trump now has a four-point lead over Hillary Clinton.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey of Likely U.S. Voters finds Mr. Trump with 43% of the vote, while Clinton earns 39%.
This is Donald Trump’s highest level of support in Rasmussen Reports’ matchups with Clinton since last October.
Mr. Trump now earns 75% support among his fellow Republicans and picks up 14% of the Democratic vote. Seventy-six percent (76%) of Democrats like Clinton, as do 10% of GOP voters.
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump made a major speech that even the New York Times characterized as “perhaps the most forceful case he has made for the crux of his candidacy …. that the days of globalism have passed and that a new approach is necessary.”
Some speculate that last week’s vote in Great Britain and the latest terrorist carnage in Turkey signal a rise of economic nationalism that is good for Mr. Trump.
Mr. Trump now holds a 14-point lead among men, while Clinton leads by six among women. The candidates are tied among those under 40, while Mr. Trump leads among older voters.
Clinton continues to hold a wide lead among blacks. Mr. Trump leads among whites and other minority voters.

roadreeler57 · Jul 1, 2016

What they dont figure in is 1/2 of the hard core Democrats are staying home on election day.....Republican voting for Trump will be 30 to 40% higher than normal...

superbeets · Jul 1, 2016

They don't figure VP choice.

They don't figure outcomes of both conventions.

Willie99 · Jul 1, 2016

Gas Man said:
This just in....

Ben Carson still practicing Neurosurgery...

you mean his license wasn't revoked? "in all 50 states"?

The Guesser · Jul 5, 2016

JUN 30, 2016 AT 11:26 AM
[h=1]An 80 Percent Shot Doesn’t Mean Clinton Is A Sure Thing[/h]
A FiveThirtyEight Chat
Filed under 2016 Election

In this week’s politics chat, we discuss FiveThirtyEight’s general election forecast for 2016, which launched Wednesday and will be updated through Election Day. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

David (Firestone, managing editor): After a lot of work, our general election forecast has gone live! But not everyone fully understands what a forecast model is. Some people think it’s a poll or are incorrectly saying, “Nate calls the race for Clinton.” Can we start by explaining at a basic level what a forecast model tells us?
Clare (Malone, senior political writer): Say it very, very slowly and use small words, please.
Nate (Silver, editor in chief): Pro buh bil it eez.
Harry (Enten, senior political writer): Looks like some artisanal tea that I’d buy in hipster Brooklyn.
Nate: Not everything 0 percent or 100 percent! Some things in between! Cookie Monster like numbers in between!
Harry: I believe Cookie Monster now eats vegetables.
David: And that in-between number gives Hillary Clinton about an 80 percent chance of winning, which obviously doesn’t mean it’s over.
Clare: Did Cookie vote Trump? Or is he a Bernie Bro?
Nate: I’m sort of annoyed by it being 80 percent, because I feel like that’s the number people most misinterpret. When you say 80 percent, people take that to mean “really, really certain.” It’s not, particularly.
David: I liked your ballgame analogy, Nate, in the article you wrote to accompany the forecast. Teams come back from 20-percent-win situations frequently. In fact, about 20 percent of the time!
Nate: Absolutely amazing how that works!
Clare: You’re annoyed that it’s a high number because people are going to glom onto that and think it holds for the whole election? Not realizing that this is where things stand as of June 29 and that it’ll change as things go on and polls come in?
Nate: It can change, sure. But let’s be clear — 80 percent is the forecast Clinton has to win on Nov. 8. That’s our best estimate of her chances, accounting for the uncertainty between now and then, based on the historical accuracy of presidential polling. If the election were held today instead, she’d be a safer bet still.
The polls can change a lot between now and Nov. 8. And they probably will. But there’s a chance those changes benefit Clinton, and not Donald Trump. And since she’s up by about 7 points now, there’s the chance they help Trump … but not enough to allow him to win.
And that’s the thing. Of the 80 percent of the time Clinton wins — PLENTY of those times are going to involve her sweating. Either because Trump makes it very close at the end or because there are some periods in which things look very tight along the way, as they did for Obama against McCain and against Romney.
But Clinton will win a lot of those close calls, along with her share of landslides.
Clare: So the Clinton campaign should not change its warm-up song to “Landslide” just yet? (The Fleetwood Mac version, obvs, not the Dixie Chicks cover.)
David: Because it’s a model, we’ll be feeding new polls into it as they come out every day, or whenever we have them. And the polls-plus version also changes with economic performance. So we can expect to see fluctuations in the numbers regularly, and sometimes those can be serious changes.
Clare: This model eats!
Harry: Only the best food, no fast food.
Clare: Yeah, can you explain what the “pluses” are in polls plus? The sauce on our model’s low-fat, totally organic polls, if you will.
Nate: The “plus” is the economy, basically. Which isn’t so good right now, but also not so bad. But certainly, in the abstract, you’d expect this to be a close election. With no incumbent and an average economy, that should mean a level playing field.
Harry: I should point out that our model does not take into account something like the president’s approval rating, which isn’t strongly tied to the final result without an incumbent but isn’t nothing either. And the president’s approval rating isn’t terrible right now.
David: If this were a normal election, or even a closer one, what patterns in the polls could we expect to see after the primaries? Bounces after the conventions, movements based on big speeches or ads?
Harry: After the conventions, you may not see big bounces. You sort of saw one last time after the first presidential debate, but that wasn’t a big one in the state polls. I think the clearest case of movement was probably 1948, and that was when the economy was getting better and better. (Truman, of course, closed a big gap in the polls and shocked everyone by winning the election. There were no public polls conducted in the final weeks of that campaign.) It’s not that the polls cannot move. It’s just that they usually move to where the economy might direct it to — not because of a big speech.
David: So it sounds like the biggest changes in the polls could come from factors the candidates themselves can’t control? Like major news events or economic changes?
Nate: I dunno. We’ve had a couple of major news events, and they didn’t seem to move the needle as much toward Trump as he might have hoped. In fact, they didn’t seem to help him at all.
Harry: Wasn’t it just a few weeks ago that some people were saying the attack in Orlando could help Trump?
Clare: I think few people expected his tactless, self-congratulatory response.
David: Yeah, he seems to step on his opportunities whenever they happen, including suggesting that the Brexit vote was great for his Scottish golf course.
Clare: But are there things outside of the economy and a terrorist attack that could hurt Clinton a lot, if this is hers to lose? Email shenanigans, perhaps? Is that just no longer that big of a factor? We’ve all talked about it ad nauseam, it seems. I wonder if peoples’ opinions have changed much on the subject.
David: A lot of Republicans are hoping for an indictment, which seemshighly unlikely. Hard to see how the email thing will get worse for her if that doesn’t happen.
Harry: What’s so great about modeling, though, as Nate has mentioned to me, is it can give you an insight into something you cannot see yourself. I don’t know what event can turn Trump’s campaign around, but I know it is possible.
Nate: Yeah, might I suggest that trying to come up with the scenario by which Trump wins is exactly what gets you in trouble? There are known unknowns, but a lot of the 20 percent is unknown unknowns.
Harry: Thanks, Rumsfeld.
Nate: Or it’s a case where several little things go wrong for Clinton, instead of one big thing.
Say a lot of the Bernie Sanders vote goes to Gary Johnson or Jill Stein, and the economy is taking some hits, and Trump’s voters turn out at greater rates than polls expect them to. No one of those factors is enough to overcome a 7-point deficit. But collectively, they could be enough.
Harry: I think one of the great polling questions is: How do you account for third-party candidates? Some pollsters just ignore them. Some aggregators ignore them. But I tend to think you should include them when they are probably going to be on the ballot in all 50 states and the candidate is regularly getting above 5 percent in the polls.
Nate: And most polls are including Johnson, these days. That’s generally been the rule of thumb. Once a candidate gets into the high single digits or low double digits, most polls will include him. And Johnson probably will be on the ballot in 50 states, or pretty close to it.
Clare: Do we anticipate Johnson’s support growing over time, being affected by various hits that candidates take throughout the campaign? Or could his support just fade out as we head into the fall? Did Perot, for instance, see a rise or a fall as the … fall came?
Harry: It could go either way. I hate to use this word, but third-party candidacies are often about “momentum.” Can the candidate catch on and be a viable choice? Perot was, in 1992, and his support held at near 20 percent after re-entering the race. (He was regularly in the 30s before exiting the first time.) Then you have someone like John Anderson, who in 1980 started in the 20s and slowly fell to just above 5 percent.
David: The most striking thing about the model to me is when you get to the state level, which of course is where the electoral battle is really fought. There are some unexpected colors there. Georgia isn’t dark red — it’s pink. In our polls-only model, Arizona is a light blue, as is North Carolina. Clinton even has a shot in my home state of Missouri, which I would never have predicted. Harry, how surprised were you by the roll of states?
Harry: I’m not surprised based on the polls I’ve been seeing from the states. The model puts a nice number on it. I’m more surprised by the results from states where we don’t have a lot of polling. I’m talking about places like Mississippi and South Carolina.
Clare: Yeah, Mississippi being so light red in our model really struck me! Texas too!
David: There’s only one poll in from Mississippi, and it shows Trump ahead — but only by 3 points.
Harry: We have had two recent Texas polls showing Trump up by less than 10 percentage points.
Nate: So the reason the model has states like Mississippi and Texas kinda close is because that’s where the polls have it. It’s been a pretty consistent pattern. It’s hard — not impossible, but hard — to find polls where Trump leads by double digits, even in the reddest states.
Harry: How about that one Kansas poll that had Clinton ahead!
Clare: Was there a state or group of states that surprised you the most as you were going through all this, Nate?
Nate: See, I thought it was quirky things about Kansas or Utah or whatever. But it’s really across the board. There have been Mississippi, Alaska and Texas polls that also show a pretty close race, and those states don’t have a lot in common with one another.
Harry: They all have vowels in them!
Clare: You are excused from this chat now, Harry.
Harry: Is that nice? Is that nice? To think I introduced you to Colin Quinn.
Nate: OMG Hollywood Harry. Getting all name-droppy.
Clare: It’s true. I will always be in Harry’s debt for that one.
Nate: We’re going to trade you to the “Keepin’ It 1600” podcast for a reporter to be named later
Harry: A friend of mine loves that podcast and keeps mentioning it to me.
Clare: Wait, so what’s the matter with Kansas? And Alaska and Utah? Educated guesses?
Nate: I guess what I’m saying, Clare, is that people are maybe overinterpreting why exactly it’s Utah and Kansas where Trump is doing badly, as opposed to Idaho and Nebraska.
Harry: Now as for Kansas, we see Trump doing worse in more traditionally Republican libertarian and religious states.
Nate: Part of it is just because there aren’t a ton of polls in any of these states.
David: In both Kansas and Missouri, Clinton has won a poll. OK, they’re B- or C- polls in our pollster ratings, but it’s a little hard to imagine, and seems to be a reflection of the disarray with the GOP. The hard-line conservatives and evangelicals in those states just aren’t checking the Trump box in the surveys. Yet.
Harry: I should note our polls-only model gives Clinton a 51 percent chance of carrying Nebraska’s 2nd congressional district and its one electoral vote.
Nate: Trump didn’t do all that well in the Midwest in the primaries. And I could come up with an argument for why the temperament there doesn’t suit him, but I’ll just say it’s totally reasonable to think he’ll have trouble in that Nebraska district given the polls in nearby states.
Clare: This is a good chance for you to talk about regionalism, no? States as blocs.
Nate: Maybe, but maybe that’s getting too granular? Trump’s getting only 37 percent of the vote or so right now. It’s been a long time since a major-party candidate did so poorly. Where are his “missing” voters? A lot of them are in red states, as best as we can figure. Which is good news for Trump, in a way. A lot of those voters were superfluous. Say you win South Carolina by 5 points instead of 12? Not that big a deal.
Harry: The two Texas polls had him at 37 percent and 39 percent.
Nate: On the flip side, it might mean that the low-hanging gains for Trump to make are mostly in red states and that if he gains 3 points on Clinton nationally, maybe he only gains half as much in swing states.
David: Clare, you’re going to be hitting some of these regions as the campaign goes on. Which ones are you most interested in visiting to learn some on-the-ground answers to these questions?
Clare: I’m pretty interested in the South and the voters who Nate says are missing, but maybe it’s not that big of a deal they’re missing. Regardless, I’m wondering if some of these people are those who haven’t voted in a while and whether there is a turnout strategy for them from the Republican National Committee, which seems like it’s going to be by default running Trump’s on-the-ground game.
David: It’s not clear anyone has explained the ground-game concept to Trump.
Clare: But also, obviously, places like Arizona that are surprisingly swingin’ this year.
Harry: Arizona is a state where our polls-only model says Clinton is a slight favorite. The reason? The polls.
Nate: I guess I’d just say the map looks strange in part because the map has been so steady over the past four or five elections. Over the long term, that’s actually pretty anomalous. Instead, the swing states shift around, sometimes gradually and sometimes more suddenly.
Harry: If you look at the 1996 election, Arkansas and Louisiana were heavily blue states. No Democratic presidential candidate has won them since. States do and will change.
Nate: To me, the notion that Arizona is a tossup or that Maine might be pretty competitive if Trump’s position improves — those aren’t even particularly radical changes. They’d be considered quite normal, by historical standards.
Harry: If you look at the 2012 campaign, the Republican candidate for Senate in Arizona, Jeff Flake, barely won.
David: All this is why readers should tune into this model frequently over the next four months. States can and will change colors, and if you wake up early one morning, you might be the first to catch it on our site.
[h=3]Related: ELECTIONS PODCAST[/h][h=2]What The Model Knows (Live From San Francisco)[/h]

Nate: And we have the two different versions of the model too. The map in polls-plus looks more familiar, but it gets there by making some stronger assumptions. Polls-only is more open-minded about what might happen.
Remember that when Obama won in 2008, he won by 7 points, which is exactly the margin by which Clinton is ahead now in the polling average. And he flipped a bunch of states to the blue column — Virginia, North Carolina, Indiana — that people thought of as being pretty surprising at the time.
Those states are in different categories. The demographics have trended Democratic in Virginia. Indiana was more of a one-off, because Obama contested it and McCain blew it off. North Carolina is still red-leaning but — well, you win in a near-landslide, and you win most of the pink states in addition to the purple ones.
David: We’ll be providing frequent updates to the forecast by Nate, Harry, Clare and anyone else who cares to chime in. Please come back regularly and watch the numbers move.
Clare:

Nate

superbeets · Jul 5, 2016

Donald Trump has a 20 to 25 per cent chance of winning the presidency, Nate Silver predicts

The polling analyst warned that Mr Trump has 'a real chance', but Hillary Clinton is 'a fairly clear favourite'

superbeets · Jul 5, 2016

Cautioning readers not to take Ms Clinton’s victory for granted, Mr Silver concluded: “A 20 per cent or 25 per cent chance of Trump winning is an awfully long way from 2 per cent, or 0.02 per cent. It’s a real chance… But the polls establish Clinton as a fairly clear favourite. And in contrast to almost everything else this election cycle, the polls have mostly been right so far.”

Nate Silver's first general election prediction for 2016

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