Nate Silver went on a tirade about how pollsters lie to people about their results just days before the election.
Silver, founder of the polling analysis site FiveThirtyEight, was speaking on his podcast when he was asked what his models tell him will happen next Tuesday.
While he says there is a 55% chance of Donald Trump winning to Kamala Harris’ 45%, what pollsters have been doing in the run-up to the election has left him uneasy.
He claims that many polls, including Emerson College, are doing something called “gathering” (or using the results of existing polls to impact new polls) to keep producing close polls with one candidate or the other ahead by one point.
‘I actually trust pollsters less, everyone, every time a pollster (says) ‘Oh, every state is just +1, every state is tied,’ No! You are shepherding! You are cheating! You’re cheating!’
Nate Silver went on a tirade about how pollsters lie to people about their results just days before the election.
Silver maintains that polls could favor one candidate or another, but that ultimately the problem is that “information that has no potential to surprise is worthless.”
‘Not all of your numbers will come out exactly 1 point ahead when you sample 800 people in dozens of surveys. You’re lying! You’re putting your damn finger on the scale!’
He criticized Emerson but also “all these Republican-leaning companies” that show Trump leading by small margins to basically project that “we’re not going to take too many risks.”
He says all pollsters except the New York Times are “for the most part just betting on this election.”
“If a pollster never publishes figures that surprise you, then it has no value,” he concluded.
However, he cautioned that all the close polls could simply be correct and that the race is more or less a toss-up.
“But look, the seven swing states are still polling, and it looks like there’s a point and a half here.” It doesn’t take a genius to know that if every swing state is a tie, the overall forecast is a tie.
Trump led Harris in the latest DailyMail.com/JL Partners national poll before Election Day, and the former president has a three-point lead over the vice president.
Silver says there is a 55% chance of Donald Trump winning to Kamala Harris’ 45%, what pollsters have been doing in the run-up to the election has left him uneasy.
Trump led Harris in the final DailyMail.com/JL Partners national poll ahead of Election Day, with the former president maintaining a three-point lead over the vice president.
Both candidates have shored up their bases, but Trump has done better in winning support from independents and undecided voters in the final effort, according to the data.
The poll of 1,000 likely voters, which has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percent, shows Trump trending upward, with support at 49 percent to Harris’ 46 percent.
The race is still close. However, with five days left, the numbers mean Trump is currently on track to become the first Republican candidate since George W. Bush in 2004 to win the popular vote.
The vice president had a one-point lead when the last poll was conducted in September.
She enjoyed a two-month honeymoon after President Joe Biden announced he was ending his re-election campaign. His poll numbers and fundraising surged amid a wave of enthusiasm.
But since then the race has become closer, becoming one of the closest in history.
