November 5th 2024.
Notable statistician Nate Silver has just released his final forecast for the US election, and according to his expert analysis, it's a virtual toss-up. Silver is renowned for his statistical prowess, having famously predicted the outcome of the 2012 election with pinpoint accuracy through his website FiveThirtyEight.
This year, Silver ran an astounding 80,000 simulations of the Electoral College contest between current Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. The results were strikingly close, with Harris winning 40,012 simulations and Trump securing 39,988 victories. In his own words, Silver declared, "The race is literally closer than a coin flip: empirically, heads wins 50.5 percent of the time, just slightly more than Harris's 50.015 percent."
On Tuesday, Silver shared his findings on his Substack page, revealing that Harris did not come out as the winner in 39,988 simulations, with Trump emerging victorious in 39,718 of those scenarios. The remaining 270 simulations resulted in an Electoral College tie, which Silver explained would ultimately lead to a Trump victory through voting in the US House of Representatives.
"This is my fifth presidential election – and my ninth general election overall, counting midterms – and there has never been anything like this," Silver wrote, highlighting the unprecedented nature of this year's race. His prediction comes just days after a recent poll from the Des Moines Register and Mediacom in Iowa showed Harris leading Trump in the state with a narrow margin of 47 percent to 44 percent. However, this falls within the poll's margin of sampling error of 3.4 points and suggests no clear leader in the traditionally Republican state.
It's worth noting that this marks a shift from the previous Iowa Poll in September, which had Trump in the lead by a narrow margin. Iowa has had a mixed track record in recent presidential elections, voting for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, and then flipping to Trump in 2016 and again in 2020. With the race being so close, it's anyone's guess as to who will come out on top in this crucial state. Only time will tell as we eagerly await the final results.
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