Shattering the expectations of one of the political world’s most well-known political prognosticators as he emerges as the Republican Party’s presumptive presidential nominee has earned Donald Trump a one-in-four chance of becoming president, according to Nate Silver.
“If you look at betting markets, they say that Trump has about a 25 percent chance. I think that’s sensible,” Silver said Sunday on CNN’s “Reliable Sources.” “If you held the election today, there’s enough polling to know that today [likely Democratic presidential candidate Hillary] Clinton would very probably win. But you can have recessions, you can have terror attacks. Clinton is not a very popular candidate herself.”
“Maybe Trump is a black swan,” Silver continued, adding “I put Trump’s chance of becoming president — 25 percent, much higher today than a year ago.”
Many polls would lend support to the odds Silver gives Trump. In a hypothetical general election matchup, a RealClearPolitics average of polls puts former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton up 47.3 percent to Trump’s 41.6 percent.
Still, Silver says this election cycle “is one of the crazier things we’ve seen in American politics for a long time. I think it was fair for us to be skeptical early on.”
Silver, who gained credence for using poll data to correctly predict the results of 49 out of 50 states in the 2008 general election and all 50 states in 2012, has for months belittled Trump’s chances of locking the GOP nomination. When Trump announced his candidacy in June of last year, Silver wrote that Trump “isn’t a real candidate.” Silver’s outlook on Trump changed little by September when the editor-in-chief of the statistics analysis website FiveThirtyEight said that Trump had around a 5 percent chance of defeating his Republican rivals.
Exploring where his past predictions went awry, Silver explained that Trump defies “historical evidence,” citing the likes of 2012 GOP presidential candidates Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain, as well as George Wallace in the 1960s and 1970s, performing well in the polls early on, but ultimately loosing steam because they lacked the backing of their party.
While Trump has knocked all 16 of his political rivals out of the GOP nomination contest, and has proceeded to earn the support — if not the endorsements — of many in the Republican Party, some like House Speaker Paul Ryan, 2012 nominee Mitt Romney, and former Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush have yet to get behind him.
“This election has been the most amazing election I have ever seen,” Silver said. “Trump’s rise to power is inherently kind of amazing and remarkable. Also scary in some other respects.”
