Two Weeks Out, Nate Silver Reveals His 'Gut' Feeling

Nate Silver has seen the polls and studied them every which way, and thus he writes unsurprisingly in a New York Times essay that the 2024 race is coin toss—"50-50 is the only responsible forecast." But the founder of FiveThirtyEight, who now authors the Silver Bulletin newsletter, adds that he is asked over and over again about what his gut says.

• "So OK, I'll tell you. My gut says Donald Trump. And my guess is that it is true for many anxious Democrats."

Much of his essay, however, then explains why you shouldn't trust anyone's gut, "including mine," when it comes to elections. Intuition makes more sense in poker because a player develops it after playing thousands of hands. Watching an election once every four years is a different story. So, yes, his gut favors Trump, but the stats are agnostic. They even suggest that one candidate—maybe Trump, maybe Kamala Harris—has a 60% chance of winning by a wide margin by sweeping six of seven battleground states. "Don't be surprised if a relatively decisive win for one of the candidates is in the cards—or if there are bigger shifts from 2020 than most people's guts might tell them," writes Silver. (Read the full essay.)