How Nate Silver Responded to Election Results

Statistician Nate Silver has responded to Donald Trump’s projected victory, as the former president sits on 266 electoral votes to Vice President Kamala Harris’ 219.

On his newsletter site Silver Bulletin, the pollster published a blog post titled “24 reasons that Trump won.” The listed reasons included high inflation rates, Elon Musk’s support and the rise of immigration under the Biden-Harris administration. He also praised Trump’s populism as a “highly effective strategy.”

While sharing the blog post on X, formerly Twitter, Silver wrote: “I managed to stay off Twitter all night. We sort of pre-wrote our ‘Trump wins’ piece on Oct. 20, so linking to it here, I think one thesis we really got right this cycle is this was a difficult environment for Harris and other Democrats. More tomorrow.”

The pollster also reacted to the news of a likely Trump win by taking down his election model, which had predicted a Harris win throughout the night despite the announced results.

In a post on Silver Bulletin, Silver wrote: “We are taking the model down for two reasons. One, it isn’t capturing the story of this election night well. It’s based only on called states and the timing of those calls. So far, all the calls have been predictable. But no swing states have been called and there is a lot of information it doesn’t capture, information that is mostly good for Donald Trump and bad for Kamala Harris—not the 50/50 race the ‘called’ states might imply. Something like The New York Times needle is a much better product.”

At the time of writing—with Trump just shy of the 270 electoral votes needed for a formal win—The New York Times needle leaned toward a “very likely” victory for the Republican candidate, giving the former president a greater than 95 percent chance of electoral success.

The outlet’s needle also estimated 312 electoral votes for Trump and 226 for Harris, and its popular vote estimate also showed Trump leading.

Silver said technical difficulties contributed to the decision to take down the election model.

“It’s very hard to do real-time debugging with a team of just two people in a real-time election night environment,” he wrote. “So, we’re spending a lot of time trying to fix code that isn’t working right—and it’s distracting from our ability to cover the election for you. We think we took on one too many things, and we appreciate your patience.”

In the lead-up to the election, Silver’s model changed significantly.

Hours before the polls opened, he released an election forecast in which he estimated Harris had a 50 percent chance of winning the Electoral College to Trump’s 49.6 percent.

On November 4, his model said Trump had a 50.4 percent chance of winning compared to Harris’ 49.2 percent.

In a November 5 blog post, the pollster wrote, “When I say the odds in this year’s presidential race are about as close as you can possibly get to 50/50, I’m not exaggerating.”

Silver added that if offered a “free bet,” he would put his money on Harris to win.