Donald Trump Joe Biden Debate (CNN screen shot)
Nate Silver, the famed statistician and founder of the political predictions and observations website FiveThirtyEight, is painting a grim picture of President Joe Biden’s chances of winning reelection to the presidency this November. This is after Biden’s performance against Donald Trump at last Thursday’s presidential debate was universally criticized. Biden was said to appear confused, reinforcing the opinion of many that he is too old and frail to continue serving as President of the United States.
“Biden is very probably incapable of running the campaign that he needs to,” said Silver. “Maybe he’s only down the equivalent of a touchdown at halftime, but it’s hard to win that game when your quarterback is playing with a severe concussion.”
“Also they’re playing with a coaching staff that thought it would be a good idea to send the obviously concussed QB out for the second half,” added Silver. “Let’s not lose sight of that either.”
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“We ran a model update based on the handful of national polls out post-debate (one very bad for Biden, two not so bad),” Nate Silver wrote on Twitter. “But it will take several more days to get high-quality polls that reliably gauge the impact. Probably another update tomorrow.”
Silversaid “Yeah, there’s a zone where say Biden loses 2 points in the post-debate polls (the few scraps of data we have so far seem kinda consistent with that), which would pretty acutely hurt his chances in our model but probably isn’t enough to persuade him to drop out.”
“Let’s say he’s down 3 or 3.5 points in the national average,” added Nate Silver. “You’ll still get some polls showing the national race tied or Biden +1 or whatever just on account of variance. And the ‘unskewers’ and cherry pickers, who are legion in the White House, will glom on to those.”
All of this comes after before the debate Silver held a more positive opinion of Joe Biden’s chances of winning.
A few days before the debate, his 538 website declared that with 133 days until Election Day, “our forecast still sees the presidential race as a pure toss-up.,” adding that at that time “President Joe Biden is favored to win in 506 out of 1,000 of our model’s simulations of how the election could go, while former President Donald Trump wins in 490 of our simulations. There is still a small chance of the pure chaos scenario: In 4 simulations, no candidate wins a majority of Electoral College votes, which would throw the election to the House of Representatives.”
On the bright side, Nate Silver does still see a chance that Joe Biden might win.
“Biden might win because there’s inherent uncertainty in elections,” he wrote on Twitter. “It’s not a totally lost cause. But this is not the odds-on play, and they can’t even run a good bluff anymore.”
Nate Silver is an American statistician, writer, and poker player who analyzes baseball, basketball, and elections. He is best known for founding the website FiveThirtyEight, which uses statistical analysis to predict outcomes in various fields.
Silver gained national attention for his accurate predictions of the 2008 and 2012 U.S. presidential elections. He has also written several books on baseball statistics and the application of statistics to other fields.
In addition to his work at FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver is also a co-founder of the data journalism website The Upshot.
