In 2008, Nate Silver gained worldwide fame when, thanks to his statistical model, he correctly predicted the outcome in 49 out of 50 states in the presidential elections that resulted in Democrat Barack Obama’s victory. He also correctly predicted the outcomes in the 2012 (Obama’s victory) and 2020 (Joe Biden’s victory) elections. While he failed in 2016, his model gave Donald Trump the highest chances of winning.
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Silver is a statistician, economist from the University of Chicago, election analyst, and also a baseball analyst. In 2008, he founded the site FiveThirtyEight, which was affiliated with the New York Times, and in 2013 it was acquired by Disney for the ABC News and ESPN sites. Silver stepped down as editor-in-chief last year.
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What does Nate Silver's model say about the 2024 elections?
This Wednesday Silver delivered his predictions for the presidential elections that will take place on Tuesday, November 5th and for the first time the result shows a victory for the Republican candidate, in this case, Donald Trump.
“When the model was finally done on Sunday night, it turned out that Trump was favored by a slightly larger degree than I’d anticipated at Manifest — although Biden retains highly viable paths to victory,” said Silver.
The model, based on available national and state surveys, conducted 40,000 simulations that showed that Trump has a 65.7% chance of becoming the next president of the United States thanks to the Electoral College, where he would secure 287.2 votes (270 are needed to win the election).
On the other hand, Silver’s model shows that Biden has a 51% chance of winning the popular vote (the result would be narrow, 47.2% against 47.1%), but it is not a very relevant data, since the last time a Republican candidate received more votes nationwide was George W. Bush in 2004. In 2016, for example, Donald Trump got nearly 3 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton (46.1% against 48.2%), but won 304-227 in the Electoral College.
Interestingly, the predictive model of FiveThirtyEight, former site of Nate Silver, gives Biden a 51% chance of winning the Electoral College.
What is the Electoral College of the United States?
The US government defines the Electoral College as “a process,” not a place.
When choosing the president and vice president of the country, "the final result does not directly depend on the citizen's vote." The winners are determined by the vote of the "electors."
According to the US government website, "the incorporation of electors in the election process was established in the Constitution to find a middle ground between the citizen's popular vote and the Congress's vote."
Thus, each state is assigned a number of electors according to the number of representatives (established by the population of each state) and senators (established by federal equality, two per state).
The candidate with the most votes in each state (except for Maine and Nebraska) wins all the electors.
The total number of electors is 538 (hence the name of the Silver site) and the state with the most electors is California with 55, while Montana, Wyoming, Vermont, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware, Alaska, plus the District of Columbia, have 3 each.