Renowned statistician and longtime political polling expert Nate Silver discussed how he thinks the landscape is shaping up for next month’s election, as well as the role the corporate media are playing in the race.
In an interview on an episode of the popular Modern Wisdom podcast released Thursday, Silver told host Chris Williamson that while former President Donald Trump is doing significantly well with minority voters compared to past Republicans, Vice President Kamala Harris is improving on past Democratic performance with white voters.
Silver also criticized the mainstream media for downplaying the July 13 and September 15 assassination attempts against Trump – as well as the apparent cognitive decline of incumbent President Joe Biden.
In addition, Silver argued that Harris’ selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate was “probably a mistake,” and that social media discourse serves as an important counterbalance to the mainstream media’s left-wing bias.
Multiple times throughout the interview, Silver stated that he currently views the race as a tossup and likened it to a coin flip. He added that the presidency is likely “going to come down probably to a few tens of thousands of votes” in a handful of battleground states.
“You’re not going to learn anything new from the polls between now and November,” he said. “It’s very likely to be close, we have a very good idea of which states are likely to be the most important.”
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Williamson asked Silver to list the election’s “most important battleground topics.”
“Which issues do different cohorts of voters care about the most?” he asked.
Silver said that for Democrats “the single best issue is probably abortion,” and for Republicans “immigration is almost undoubtedly their best issue.”
“People are concerned about the influx of immigrants into the United States,” the expert stressed.
The changing coalitions
Williamson asked: “What’s different about Trump’s coalition of voters than past Republicans’? And the same for Kamala.”
Silver described what he termed “racial depolarization in the electorate.”
“White voters are getting more Democratic, whereas voters of color, especially younger ones – younger black voters, younger Hispanics, younger Asians – are getting more Republican,” he explained.
“In one sense that’s good,” he said. “But it does lead to some counterintuitive things on the map.”
“If Harris is doing better with white voters than Biden was four years ago, that’s why you can keep the whiter Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan states, even if her polling is not as strong in say, North Carolina or Arizona,” he indicated.
Playing for the center
Williamson asked the expert statistician if Harris picking Walz instead of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro as her running mate was a “mistake.”
Shapiro is widely viewed as a more “moderate” Democrat than Walz – who was touted by several far-left politicians such as Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-VT, in the days leading up to Harris’ running mate selection.
“I think if you’re playing the percentages, it’s probably a mistake,” Silver said.
He indicated that Pennsylvania is the most important of the seven battleground states in his statistical model “about a third of the time.”
Silver called “playing for the center” and winning over moderate independents an “underrated cliché” in American politics.
Of the assertion that the candidate “seen as the most moderate” usually wins, Silver said, “I think that’s still actually correct if you look at the long term.”
“This is why Harris, for example, is trying to moderate, or if you prefer flip-flopping, on issues like fracking, or policing, or now taking a much harder line on the border, and things like that,” he stated.
Expanding the circle
Silver also observed that on the issue of abortion “Trump has tried to moderate,” but on “everything else, not really.”
Despite this, Silver noted that Trump, without compromising most of his ideological stances, is still trying to “expand the circle” of his potential voters in various ways.
“When he goes on these different podcasts, he goes to communities that Republicans typically don’t go to, he’s trying to expand that circle,” he said.
With regard to Harris’ attempted moderation, the analyst said: “I think there are legitimate questions about whether Harris is the more pragmatic version we’ve seen this year, or the more progressive version that we saw in 2019 in the primaries.”
While Harris was mounting her failed run for the Democratic presidential nomination four years ago, she indicated that she was in favor of using taxpayer dollars to fund “gender transition surgeries for detained migrants” on a left-wing group’s candidate survey.
Silver has previously said that he is voting for Harris and referred to himself as a “liberal” during the interview with Williamson.
Silver on Trump’s assassination attempts
Williamson asked: “What was the result of Trump being shot at once and in the vicinity of a guy that wanted to shoot at him a second time?”
The host stated that he is “very surprised” the race’s polling remains close despite the pair of attempts on Trump’s life: “I would’ve thought when that happened … slam dunk, this guy’s taking a bullet for democracy, game over.”
Silver appeared to agree to an extent. “The assassinations [sic] have kind of fallen off the map a little bit.”
“They haven’t gotten a ton of media coverage,” he pointed out.
“This is why when I hear my liberal friends complaining about kind of the media, I’m like, ‘I don’t know,’” he said.
Silver said that in addition to the two assassination attempts against Trump, “another thing that hasn’t gotten much coverage lately is Joe Biden’s performance or fitness for office.”
“It’s not just an election story, it’s also a governance story,” he added. “He’s making high-level decisions.”
The role of the media
Williamson compared the dearth of interviews in which Harris had participated since she became her party’s nominee with Trump’s eagerness to sit down with a wide array of media sources.
“Trump is on every podcast, every longform interview that he can,” the host noted. “Kamala Harris isn’t doing any of this despite being sort of the queen of Gen Z.”
“Why?” Williamson asked the statistician. “What do you think is going on there?”
Silver said he thinks Harris “is getting bad advice.”
“She inherited a lot of the people who ran the Biden campaign,” Silver explained:
And Biden, because of his age and inconsistent, shall we say, performance with impromptu public speaking, they became, I think, paranoid about the press, and I think it’s stubborn and stupid.
Williamson brought up an X post Silver made last month in which he alleged that Harris’ “campaign is being run by people with PTSD over Biden’s inability to speak extemporaneously.”
Silver then told the host that “you have a lot of Democrats who believe that ‘Oh, the mainstream media is against Democrats.’”
The statistician then laughed at the assertion that the mainstream media has an anti-Democratic bias. “I work in the mainstream media,” he said. “I just do not believe that is objectively accurate.”
“If you’re a Democrat who thinks The New York Times is biased against Democrats, then I’m not sure what to tell you,” Silver added.
Silver instead thinks that “the mainstream media, The New York Times, NBC, ABC, CBS News, is on balance center-left.”
These sources “frame certain issues, especially culture war stuff, toward a more progressive worldview,” he noted.
‘Counterweights’ to the mainstream media
However, Silver added that there are “some powerful counterweights” to the mainstream media. He named X – whose owner Elon Musk endorsed and interviewed Trump – as one of these counterweights.
Silver said the discourse on the app has “moved to the right.” He also named “TikTok, potentially, and Facebook” as counterweights to the corporate media’s influence.
“And also, you have a lot of Republicans who are Republicans because they don’t trust the mainstream media,” he continued. “Because they lost trust during COVID, or during the financial crisis.”
“So, I’m not sure it helps Democrats to have the media,” Silver concluded.
Silver’s statistical journey: From ‘whiz kid’ to maverick
Compared to other prominent political forecasters, Silver has been notably bullish on Trump’s chances of heading back to the White House.
A week ago, he had a spat with history professor Allan Lichtman on X. Lichtman, a known Democrat, had recently used his prediction model The Keys to the White House to confidently predict a Harris win in November.
However, Silver accused the liberal professor of incorrectly applying the Keys, stating that if he correctly applied them, Trump would instead be the model’s projected 2024 winner.
Lichtman replied to Silver’s criticism with what appeared to be an ad hominem attack against the statistician, writing on X that Silver is “not a historian or a political scientist” and “has no academic credentials.”
The professor’s Keys had predicted nine out of the last ten elections correctly – including Trump’s stunning upset win over failed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016.
In its entire 40-year existence, the Keys had only gotten the winner wrong in the razor-thin 2000 contest, when it predicted an Al Gore victory.
A month ago, Silver’s own statistical model made headlines after it gave Trump a 60% chance of winning the election. The same model now favors Harris by a 56% to 44% spread.
However, in a Friday analysis, Silver and a co-author cautioned that the race is currently “about as close to a pure tossup as you can get.”
Silver “has a reputation as a well-respected political forecaster going back more than a decade,” CatholicVote previously reported:
Silver became a household name – particularly on the political left – following the 2012 presidential election, when his forecast correctly predicted then-President Barack Obama’s reelection, down to the result of every swing state.
The day after the election, the left-wing publication The Guardian deemed Silver the “big winner of US election night,” calling him a “statistical guru.”
LifeNews Note: Joshua Mercer writes for CatholicVote, where this column originally appeared.
