Nate Silver, the elections guru and statistical expert who founded FiveThirtyEight, has come out with his forecasting model for the 2024 presidential election, which suggests that former President and presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is favored to beat President Joe Biden in a rematch of their showdown four years ago.

“The model is ready,” announced Silver on X. “And here’s our headline: the presidential election isn’t a toss-up.”

According to Silver, his model is largely the same as the one he built for FiveThirtyEight and used for the 2020 election, but adjusting for “turnout dynamics,” factoring in the increased relevance of third-party candidates such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. this time around, and without “Covid-specific assumptions.”

Before revealing his model’s conclusion, Silver notes the inherent problems with building such models:

Statistical modeling requires making a lot of choices. And election forecasting is a hard problem. Even choices as seemingly straightforward as how to calculate a “polling average” involve any number of parameters: which polls to include, how to weight them, how much to prioritize the most recent ones, and so on. This is even more of an issue once we start to consider “fundamental” factors such as incumbency or “the economy”. Even if we can agree that it’s a good idea to incorporate these things, there are basically infinite “researcher degrees of freedom” in exactly how you do it.

All that said, Silver doesn’t mince words in expressing who he believes is the favorite right now.

“The candidate who I honest-to-God think has a better chance (Trump) isn’t the candidate I’d rather have win (Biden),” he declared. That conclusion is backed up by his model which found “that Trump was favored by a slightly larger degree” than Silver had anticipated.

“If the Electoral College/popular vote gap looks anything like it did in 2016 or 2020, you’d expect Biden to be in deep trouble if the popular vote is roughly tied,” he added. “So if we’re being honest, pundits who obsess over whether Biden is 1 point ahead in national polls are kind of missing the point.”

Nate Silver’s first forecast of this election season gives Donald Trump a 66% chance of winning at the moment.https://t.co/kMOSPZSDRO pic.twitter.com/Zf2674lqx8

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) June 26, 2024

Eventually, Silver gets around to unveiling his model, which suggests, based on 40,000 simulations run by his model, that Trump has a 65.7% chance of winning the Electoral College by an average margin of 287.2 electoral votes to Biden’s 250.4.

The model also predicts that Biden is more likely (51%) to win the popular vote, but only by a razor-thin, 47.2%-47.1% margin.

Silver’s model diverges from FiveThirtyEight’s, which suggests that Biden is narrowly favored (51%) to win the Electoral College over Trump.

The post Elections Guru Nate Silver Gives Trump a 66% Chance of Winning the Election: Not a ‘Toss-Up’ first appeared on Mediaite.

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