'Running on vibes': Pollster Nate Silver gives 24 reasons why Trump could win

As the US presidential election enters its final stretch, pollster, statistician, and founder of the polling aggregator FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver , listed 24 reasons why Republican hopeful Donald Trump could win the race for the White House in his third bid.

In his recent blog, Silver stated that this election is essentially a toss-up, but Donald Trump has been gaining ground.

"This election remains extremely close, but Donald Trump has been gaining ground. One of my pet peeves is the idea that this is Kamala Harris’s election to lose," Silver said.

"I could articulate some critiques of her campaign, but if you study the factors that have historically determined elections, you'll see that she’s facing difficult circumstances," he added.

Here is the list of factors, according to Nate Silver, that favours Donald Trump in the race to the White House.

According to Silver Vice President Harris is the favourite to win the popular votes, but the electoral college bias favours the Republican Party by about 2 percentage points. Nate added that in the era of intense partisanship and close elections, this is inherently difficult for Democrats to overcome.

Silver said that inflation and high prices will also play a key role in the elections as historically highly sensitive to inflation. Although, inflation is abated now, Democrats can also plausibly be blamed for it given intensive increases in government spending during Covid recovery efforts.

Silver also claimed that voter perceptions about the economy lag substantially behind objective data, and growth in take-home income has been sluggish for many years for the working class amid rising corporate profits.

On global trend, Silver said that the incumbent parties worldwide are doing very poorly, and the historical incumbency advantage has diminished to the point where it may now be an incumbency handicap instead given perpetually negative perceptions about the direction of the country.

The pollster also said that populism is often a highly effective strategy, and many Trump voters are indeed “deplorable” in the Hillary Clinton sense of the term.

According to the Silver, Illegal and unauthorised immigration also increased during Biden/Harris tenure amid rising global backlash to immigration. This according to Silver would also have an impact on the votes.

Harris's far left stance and unpopular positions in 2019 will also impact her poll prospects, Silver said. He added that Harris also does not really have a viable strategy for explaining her changing stances.

According to the pollster, the cultural vibes are shifting to the right, and the left continues to pay a price for the excesses of 2020 on Covid, crime, "wokeness," and other issues.

Voters have nostalgia for the relatively strong economic performance in the first three years of Trump’s term and associate the problems of 2020 with Democrats, even though they weren’t in charge at the time, Silver said.

Silver claimed that Democrats' dominance among African-American voters and other racial and ethical minority groups is slipping as the memory of the Civil Rights Era is fading. Educational polarization, which implies deteriorating Democratic performance among working-class voters of all races, may also be coming to dominate other factors. It’s possible this works out well for Democrats if Harris makes corresponding gains among white voters, who pack more leverage in the electoral college, but there’s no guarantee, he added.

According to Silver, many men, especially young men, feel lost amidst declining college enrollment, contributing to a rightward shift and a growing gender gap.

Joe Biden sought to be president until he was 86. Voters had extremely reasonable objections to this, and it neuters what should have been one of Harris’s best issues about Trump’s age and cognitive fitness, Silver siad.

According to the pollster, Harris also got a late start to her race, inheriting most of the staff from the poorly-run Biden campaign. She’s proven to be a good candidate in many respects, but it’s always a big leap when the understudy is suddenly thrust into the spotlight.

Silver added that Harris is seeking to become the first woman president. In the only previous attempt, undecideds broke heavily against Hillary Clinton, and she underperformed her polls.

Silver said that Trust in media continues to fall to abysmal levels. One can debate how to attribute blame for this between longstanding conservative efforts to discredit the media, a secular decline in trust in institutions, and various overreaching and hypocrisy in the press. But it’s hard for even legitimate Trump critiques to penetrate the mass public. Trump’s conviction on a series of felony charges hardly made any difference, for instance.

The pollster claimed that Trump has traits of a classic con man, but con artistry is often effective, and Trump is skilled at convincing voters that he’s on their side even if his election would not be in their best interest. Furthermore, Trump presents Democrats with a Three Stooges Syndrome problem: a range of plausible attacks so vast that they tend to cancel one another out.

According to Silver, Democrats’ college-educated consultant class has poor instincts for how to appeal to the mass public, while Trump has done more to cultivate support among “weird” marginal voting groups.

Silver said that Democrats' argument that Trump is a critical threat to democracy in US is a tough sell as ultimately, January 6 was a near-miss. It isn’t intuitive to voters that democracy is threatened and Democrats may have staked too many chips on this line of attack, he added.

Foreign policy might not matter much to voters, but the world has become more unstable under Biden’s tenure. There has been a decline in democracy worldwide and an increase in interstate conflict, crises in the Middle East and Ukraine, deteriorating US-China relations, increasing immigration flows because of global instability, and a pullout from Afghanistan that negatively impacted Biden’s popularity, Silver said.

Silver claimed that the Israel-Hamas war split the Democratic base in a way no comparable issue has split the GOP base.

According to Silver, there are more left-leaning third-party candidates than right-leaning ones, and the former leading third-party candidate (RFK Jr.) endorsed Trump and undermined Harris’s post-convention momentum.

The richest man in the world, Elon Musk , has become a huge Trump stan and is doing everything in his power to tip the election to him, Silver said. Twitter/X remains an influential platform among journalists but has shifted far to the right. Elon and Silicon Valley have also created a permission structure for other wealthy elites to advocate for Trump explicitly and provided a new base of money and cultural influence, he added.

Trump was very nearly killed in an assassination attempt, and then there was a second one against him. The first attempt was closely correlated with an increase in favorability ratings for Trump, and polling shows he’s considerably more popular and sympathetic than in 2016 or 2020, Silver said.

According to Silver, Harris has been running on vibes and has failed to articulate a clear vision for the country. It might have been a good strategy if the “fundamentals” favored her, but they don’t.

A series of surveys indicate that Harris holds a slim lead over Trump, with a recent Emerson College poll showing her ahead by just one point—49% to 48%—among likely voters. This follows previous polls where she had a two-point advantage in September and early October, and a four-point lead in August.

Meanwhile, a Fox News poll released on Wednesday shows Trump reclaiming a lead over Harris, with a score of 50% to 48% among likely voters. This marks a shift from Harris' earlier lead of 50% to 48% in September, after Trump had led her 50% to 49% in August.