Prior to cancelling my paid sub, I’d like to share my thoughts despite the potential “just leave” comments that will inevitably come.
I’ve consistently been vocal on here that Trump was comfortably in the lead, that the mainstream polls were once again wrong, that Seltzer’s poll was going to miss horribly, and that Nate’s model is flawed. Because of that, I was ridiculed and called names, which is unbecoming in this type of a newsletter.
The reason I’m sharing my thoughts is the earnest hope that it will lead to future improvements in the Silver Bulletin.
For, despite being a critic of Nate’s, I’ve been following him for quite a while, enjoying the past 538 articles on politics, sports and society.
I’ve been a paid sub and even purchased his book.
All this to lay the groundwork and show I’m not a troll.
Other groundwork to lay is my background. I share this to blunt whatever stereotypes critics will make of anyone who is a Trump supporter, which I am one of.
Raised in Canada, lived in Southern California for 25 years. Bachelor’s in Poli Sci and Psych. MBA. Worked in the corporate world. For the past 20 years, founded and run a humble small business. Taiwanese-American.
I had high hopes for the Silver Bulletin, but as time went on and we approached Election Day, it was clear to me that what I was reading wasn’t what I was hoping for.
All the signs were there for a massive Trump win. Yes, Nate acknowledged the possibility as much, but his algorithm really didn’t as shown by his 50/50 result after tens of thousands of simulations.
The fatal flaw, from my humble opinion, is his reliance on polls. If the polls are wrong, his model will be wrong. I realize he incorporates other factors, but the primary driver are the polls.
And this cycle, again, the “right wing” polls were all extremely accurate.
The news media and university polls missed…some by quite a bit. Again.
But honestly, you didn’t need these polls to know Trump was a heavy favorite.
All the key indicators pointed to Trump having the massive advantage:
-Wrong track was at 28%. As Harry Enten pointed out, no president wins with those numbers.
-Party ID by Pew and Gallup showed a net swing from D+4 to R+3. That’s 7 points. Party ID has a strong correlation with who wins.
-Economy / cost of living, and immigration were consistently the top issues, which Harris ran behind on.
-Harris simply would never do the same or better than Biden in the Rust Belt. Scranton Joe vs far left California Kamala. That alone should have disqualified her from consideration to run.
-Harris could never detach herself from the horrible numbers of Biden. She was trying to convince voters she will bring change, but could never answer the fundamental question of why she didn’t enact change as VP.
Then as the polls rolled out, we consistently saw Trump overperforming his 2020 numbers by 4 to 10 points.
We saw these in swing states but also in blue states.
We saw him tie the national average, which signaled a massive EC victory.
We saw him up with almost every demo: blacks, hispanics, Catholics, Jews, Arabs/Muslims, union workers, young men.
Add up all the above, and it was clear Trump should have been a 2-1 favorite at least, which coincidentally was about what the betting markets trended towards in the final days.
Yet despite all of the above, those on the left were oblivious and kept trotting out “advantages” Harris had which we now know were simply non-existent. Yet many on the left here, on blue X, commenters on Daily Kos or Slate, were convinced Harris was trending to a massive EC victory with states like FL and TX going blue.
Ann Seltzer’s historically disastrous poll that missed by an astonishing 16 points only added to their false bravado.
Because of the above, I saw an arbitrage opportunity to profit, and placed multiple bets on Kalshi.
I went 5 for 5 betting on: Trump to win, GOP to sweep Presidency / House / Senate, Trump to win the popular vote, Trump to win about 312, McCormick to win the Senate.
Those profitable bets were helped by data from Rich Baris at Big Data Poll, host of Inside the Numbers, and Robert Barnes, professional political and sports better. The info they provided were far more accurate and dispassionate than Nate’s. Eg. They didn’t give hopium that Trump would win states like VA, NH, etc.
Contrast that to Nate’s insistence that FL could NEVER go +8 for Trump, in his infamous scuffle with Keith Rabois. Nate is lucky Keith didn’t take him up on his $100,000 wager. Because not only did Trump win by 8, he won by a staggering 13.2%, flipping Miami-Dade solid red, exceeding the 10-12 that Keith predicted.
Yet there’s no acknowledgement of being wrong from Nate, on this or other aspects.
To end my much-too-long diatribe, I’m leaving some suggestions that could help improve the Bulletin:
-Take a long, hard look at how you weight polls. I kept saying, and no one had a good retort, that it was disastrous to give a poll like Quinnipiac an overweight of 1.36. Quinnipiac missed 2020 by an average of 7, and 100% in favor of Dems. They should have been disqualified from that alone, but instead Nate actually values them higher. This cycle, Quinnipiac was right only 40% of the time, worse than a coin flip.
Same goes for polls like Washington Post, which was right only 33% of the time.
Conversely, the right wing polls were right:
Atlas Intel 100%
Big Data Poll 90%
PollFair 86%
Rasmussen 86%
Quantus Insights 86%
Trafalgar 71%
Insider Advantage 71%
Left wing pundits like Litchmann, Sabato, etc were also disastrously wrong.
-I hate the 13 keys as well, but there’s something to the meta-themes that polls can’t capture. Again, I know Nate tries to incorporate some of this, but perhaps look to reduce the importance of polls and increase the importance of other factors.
-Dissect where his left wing lens may have blinded him to what was right in front of his eyes. None of us are non-partisan, but being too partisan can make us see anything we want in the data.
For those commenters who ridiculed me, called me nasty names, etc., I don’t really hold any animus. But I do hope this gave you a dose of humility, to learn that sometimes when you’re in a bubble, you can’t see that you’re in a bubble.
Despite cancelling my paid sub, I’ll still follow Nate, and I do wish him well. There’s absolutely a place for a newsletter like his that can add value to the public discourse.
Dude, the polls will likely have been off by about 2 1/2 points, which is less than the typical disparity going back to the 1960s. In other words, they were pretty accurate by historical standards. And if you don’t consult poll data, you’re relying on vibes.
EDIT: And meant to add, I thought avoiding a reliance on vibes was pretty much the whole point of subscribing to Nate's blog!
I'm not saying you're wrong broadly speaking, but the polls were off by considerably more than that in some very notable instances (e.g., Iowa (courtesy of the gold standard of polling, I'm told), or the other handful of states that were outside of the confidence interval in the model). There's also the fact that polls have underestimated Trump's performance three elections in a row, to the point that most seemed to take it as a given that the polls would skew leftward (see betting markets). I'm not saying any of that is definitive, and I generally defer to Nate's more reasoned insights. But I take the comment to be arguing for some weighting of non-polling factors and accounting for bias. Nate already does this to some degree, and I don't think that the commenter's criticisms are too ridiculous.
>...the polls were off by considerably more than that in some very notable instances...<
There are always outliers. I bet some polls thought Hoover was going to win in 1932. I assumed nearly all Silver readers were far more interested in aggregates.
Anyway, the polling consensus seemed to have converged on Harris +1.2 or so on the eve of the election. A Trump PV victory of roughly two points (or a Harris victory of roughly four points) was consistent with history, based on what the polls were telling us. I'm not going to claim I knew *in which direction* the polls were going to err: I thought it was a coin toss, as each campaign had elements they could point to as good signs.
I'm not looking to argue with you about whether or not the aggregates were good or bad this year. That doesn't seem useful or interesting. And as I said, I wasn't even disputing your general point. I was making a defense of the commenter's critiques, which seemed reasonable. But I always think it's helpful to do that, even if it doesn't immediately seem like there's much there.
It may not be useful to you, but it's useful to me in responding to the commenter's critique, which seems to accusing Nate of being badly off, because (I quote) "All the signs were there for a massive Trump win."
This seems deeply mistaken, because all the signs weren't like that at all. (And that's even assuming what we saw was a "massive" Trump win, which itself seems highly questionable: Trump's going to have one of the smallest PV margins ever for a second term winner, and he looks like he will have *lost* House seats!)
Anyway, my point is: contra the OP, the polling we had made this a challenging race to call.
It was massive by most metrics. First PV win by a GOP since 2004. He won all the swing states, increased his margins in FL and TX, and cut the D lead in blue states. Kamala did not do better than Biden in a single county. That's astounding.
Since the beginning of the Trump era (2016), the polls have been wrong for the presidential election years, but fairly accurate for the midterm elections (2018 and 2022). This might be because low-propensity voters (who are hard to reach in polls) are excited by Trump but not excited enough to vote in the midterm elections without Trump on the ballot. Or maybe because of recent events in the midterm years (white supremacist rallies in 2017-18, Donna in 2022) that got the Democratic base energized and excited to vote.
The more education a voter has the more likely they are to vote. As the two parties trade bases that means that Republicans--who used to win the college educated vote--now do better in general elections while the Democrats do better in midterms and special elections. That's the exact opposite of the status quo from a decade ago.
I agree, directionally. Playing devil's advocate though, it seems not super neat and obvious as a blanket statement. For example, many have explained last week's result as, at least in part, a problem of democratic voters not showing up (e.g., "Trump got X more votes, sure, but Kamala got Y less votes, and that's the REAL story"). There may be something to that, but it would be inconsistent with a world in which dems are now the party of high-turnout voters. Who knows lol
One hypothesis: hardcore D partisans turned out. Less devoted Democrats were discouraged by the economy, illegal immigration and crime and stayed home.
Agreed. The polls were quite accurate, well within their margin of error. Can't expect much more. Sure, Ann Selzer's polls was widely off at the end. However, in reflection, the pollsters can have a drink and celebrate. They did a better job than I was expecting.
A simple yardstick would be to look at party ID which swung from D+4 to R+3. That alone could have been a far more reliable indicator that Trump was the heavy, heavy favorite. Biden needed +4 PV win to barely eke out the EC. If I just looked at this, and ignored all the poll, I likely would have been far more accurate in deciding Trump should be a 2-1 or 3-1 favorite. Sometimes too much data is too much data.
I said GIGO before the election. You can normalize and manipulate the data all you wish, but garbage in, garbage out. Polling is broken due to low response rates from most of the electorate (and subsequent over-response of college educated Democrats) and the unwillingness of cheap public polls to take measures to combat this. There was a time when poll aggregation solved the problem, but that ended after 2008, in my opinion. The RCP average had Harris winning the popular vote, mostly because of a bunch of polls that misread the electorate. The individual states got closer, but point at each state and you'll find a few pollsters that produced wildly out of whack results time and time again that influenced the averages. Those CNN polls that dropped the last week showing +5 and +6 leads in the Rust Belt for Harris...400 LV. Crazy. Nate's averages were even more biased to Harris than the RCP ones, mainly because of his weightings.
Some better analysis than this model's inputs is required to come up with a reliable picture.
Look dude, you seem to be genuinely trying have a discussion in good faith, so I will try and do the same. The internet was just chock full of a 100,000 takes just like this for why “Trump is the clear favorite” and “Harris in a landslide” and you know what? Many of them were hot garbage from both sides, echo chamber bullshit, but there were quite a few well done, clearly articulated, and well reasoned arguments why both candidates should win. And now your guy won and you can crow about it if you want but it doesn’t make your take any more special. Hindsight is 20/20 and no one really knew a damn thing for sure until Election Day came. I came to the sliver blog not because he’s Nostradamus, but because it was a refuse from the false certainty arrogance that is ubiquitous in nearly every other area of the internet. It’s tiring. 8 billion people in the world and they are so god damn cocky. I just wanted one place where there was an acknowledgement of the uncertainty.
Also, America’s peculiar form of democracy has absolutely skewed our perceptions. 2% in the tipping point state is simply a close a fkn election, it just happens to be enough for a huge electoral victory and a clean sweep of congress. Yes, on many fronts the democrats got their ass handed to them, which is a combination of a global backlash and the Democratic having their head thoroughly stuck up their own ass. But at the end of the day, the model predicted nearly even split in the tipping point state (which it correctly predicted to be PA) and it was off by 2%, which was well within 1 standard deviation of the mean.
I get it, there are big time republican blowout vibes right now, and there is good reason. In nearly every region and every demographic voters made their displeasure with the Democratic Party known. I’m not here to repudiate the fact that this was an absolute romp. The democratic brand is dog 💩 right now and they need to do a complete top to bottom house cleaning. It’s just that, the margin of the tipping point state was 2%, so from an electoral college perspective, it was very close and the model properly prepared us for this.
> All the signs were there for a massive Trump win.
I'm not sure what you are talking about, but in any case, does that mean you realize you were wrong now, because there was no "massive Trump win"? This was a 2 point squeaker, that could just as easily have gone the other way.
“Trump over performed virtually everywhere. The polls didn’t capture that.”
When you say “overperformed” what I think you mean is “had better numbers than in 2020.” And the polls absolutely captured that. Biden won the PV by 4.5 points in 2020. Most national polls showed essentially a tied race this go around. So that means the polls captured a 4.5 point shift to Trump.
You want to get all up in your feelings because Trump is going to win the popular vote by about 1 point? OK, so the polls captured a 4.5 point swing instead of a 5.5 point swing. But don’t sit here and tell me the polls predicted something else.
I looked at the 17 most recent national polls included in the RCP average. While I think you and I can both agree in polling there isn't a statistically significant difference (with a standard MOE of 3, those numbers mean very little) between Harris +1, tied, and Trump +1, for the sake of playing your game let's say there is.
-5 polls showed Trump winning the popular vote
-5 polls showed the race tied
-7 polls showed Harris winning the popular vote
So 10/17 polls showed either Trump winning or the race tied, when the final PV margin is going to be Trump +1. That's quite good! Don't sit here and get butt hurt and cry because the data isn't supporting the conclusion you want to have.
The RCP average still had Harris up from what I recall, and here Silver had Harris heavily favored to win the popular vote. Trump beat his polling for the third consecutive election.
Again, currently Trump is ahead in the popular vote by about two points, not one. Additionally look at the number of counties where he did better compared to 2020 versus the counties where Harris improved on Biden.
Squeaker really? Trump won popular vote which not even Nate was predicting. NY was won by democrats by less than Trump.win TX and FL. NJ was <4. Complete sweep of swing states. This was a mandate and such a polarized environment This was a landslide. I think mid terms will be interesting. What if republicans keep.hold of the house in 2026?
That Trump won the popular vote was definitely somewhere in the tail of the distribution (as opposed to the center). But exceeding expectations doesn't make something a landslide lol, it makes it an 'upset'.
When all is said and done, Trump is going to have won the popular vote by about 2 points.
By contrast, Biden won it by 4.5 points, Obama by 4 points in 2012, and 7 points in 2008. Clinton won by 5.5 and 8.5, HW by 7, and Reagan won the popular vote by 10 points in 1980, and 18 points (!!) in '84.
If we compare these results to the past 50 years of elections, it definitely looks like a squeaker, albeit an unexpected one. It only looks like a 'landslide' if we compare to exactly Bush Jr. or Trump's first campaign – neither of which are particularly high bars.
Trump was like half a percentage point popular vote worth of votes away from turning NJ, VA, NH, and MN, Maine, and NM red and creating a blood bath map 360 EVs
They're inventing some world where the vote counts in all states other than the 6 they mentioned stay the same, and then adding up the margins in those 6 states to get some total that I suppose comes to 0.5% of the *national* electorate.
TL;DR: It's really bad math, and using that same logic we could say that Kamala wins the election with just 0.2% more of the popular vote – so long as that 0.2% was entirely in the blue wall (mostly PA)
Yeah but is Kamala the one who had a 7 point national swing?
I can't believe none of you are seeing the electoral vulnerability in those states in the future lol. I guess the idea is too scary to process right now. Fair enough.
My point here is to show that for every person who copes by saying Kamala was a hair away in the rust belt, don't forget trump ended up close in a whole bunch of not very swingy states, swinging many of them by double digit margins
"Compared to this one rock falling over, these two rocks falling over was def a landslide!"
Also Trump just won the PV by less than half as much as Biden, maybe a third as much, and got 6 more electoral votes. Just... what are you talking about?
Maybe you should be more than a little alarmed at New Jersey nearly becoming a swing state this cycle instead of clinging onto the idea that this election wasn’t a foreboding sign for democrats. Trump got thrashed in the public sphere for years and still managed to decisively beat Kamala; that should say a lot.
Neither election was a mandate election. Both elections repudiated the performance of the incumbent president. Both elections had historically narrow popular vote margins. Both elections had surprisingly strong performances in states that were historically out of reach. Both elections narrowly shifted control of the Senate toward the winning presidential party but lost ground in the House. Both elections ended with about 310 electoral votes (the difference mostly because of the changed number of electoral votes in battleground states after the 2020 census), and all seven 2024 battleground states were won by the winning candidate in both elections.
These two elections were almost perfect mirror images of each other, and either you must conclude that both were consequentially large victories by one party or the other, or you must conclude that both are narrow victories magnified by an electoral system that exaggerates the swings in political influence from small changes in election results. Any other interpretation is evidence of partisan wishfulfillment analysis.
For the record, I have consistently maintained that Biden did not win any form of governing mandate in 2020. The message voters sent in 2020 was only that they were not ready for another four years of Trump after suffering through the first 10 months of COVID-19 and the civil unrest following the murder of George Floyd.
President Biden massively misread the 2020 results and foolishly allowed the progressive wing of his party to pursue an extremely ambitious legislative agenda as if he had received a true electoral rout and mandate. Your comments and what we are already seeing in the first week after the election suggest that President-elect Trump is about to make the same mistaken interpretation of his election results and also overplay his political hand.
This will result in an ever-so-predictable backlash in the 2026 midterms, with the most favorable Senate map of the three Senate cycles and a House with only a very narrow Republican margin. This is a clear recipe for swinging both houses of Congress, much like the 2006 midterm cycle.
The big question is whether the Democratic Party can find a fresh new face with a fresh new vision for the party, like Obama provided in 2008. My two best outsider candidates to fulfill this role of a fresh new voice for the party are Mark Cuban and Jamie Dimon, both highly respected, politically savvy, high-profile public figures with no allegiance or baggage from legacy Democratic politics and the freedom to redefine the image of the party. Both are extremely successful businessmen with strong centrist credentials and the independence to craft a new vision for the party much as Bill Clinton did in 1992 and Obama did in 2008.
A mandate for what though? In Biden's case it was clearly a mandate for a return to the old status quo. The critical point is that there was a mismatch between what the public wanted and what the Biden admin wanted.
That's why this question is meaningless. Are the results a mandate for mass deportations? I would argue that the answer is yes, absolutely. A mandate for more troops in Syria? No, the exact opposite.
To call this a "squeaker" is a bit much. By today's standards, this was a solid win. Not a blowout, but decisive.
With so much of the electorate permanently committed to one of the two parties, you're never going to see things like Reagan '84. Obama '08 is about as big as it gets.
Like the man said, democracy is the proposition that the people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
It's often used but I think it's harmful to use "today's standards" to characterize what are historically very close races as a "solid win" or (as if often done but not what you did here, a "landslide"). We are in an era of nearly 50/50 split of the voting public of the two parties. If a <= 3% shift in the votes would have changed the outcome, then it was a squeaker.
I didn't pick the number 3% out of thin air. In 1980 pollster Pat Caddell was asked why he said the election was a flat footed tie and Reagan won by 3%. He explained: The Carter polls showed Carter down by 3%. But it had a margin of error of 3%. So they assumed they were tied when, with hindsight, they were probably down by 6%. And, back then when people really decide at the last moment and we didn't expect pollsters to exactly predict that, bad news the weekend before the election moved the voters another 3%. Resulting in what Reagan would call "a mandate" with only a 9% margin of victory.
Like in 2020, this was a very close election with a clear winner. But the fundamentals of the voting public of the two parties being split around the 50%/50% has not changed. Could it be the start of a trend: Trump lost by 4.5% four years ago and won by 1% this time... maybe. But given the seasaw nature of the last several elections, probably not.
It was massive by most metrics. First PV win by a GOP since 2004. He won all the swing states, increased his margins in FL and TX, and cut the D lead in blue states. Kamala did not do better than Biden in a single county. That's astounding.
2024 was almost an exact mirror image of 2020. Neither election was a mandate election. Both elections repudiated the performance of the incumbent president. Both elections had historically narrow popular vote margins. Both elections had surprisingly strong performances in states that were historically out of reach. Both elections narrowly shifted control of the Senate toward the winning presidential party but lost ground in the House. Both elections ended with about 310 electoral votes (the difference mostly because of the changed number of electoral votes in battleground states after the 2020 census), and all seven 2024 battleground states were won by the winning candidate in both elections.
These two elections were almost perfect mirror images of each other, and either you must conclude that both were consequentially large victories by one party or the other, or you must conclude that both are narrow victories magnified by an electoral system that exaggerates the swings in political influence from small changes in election results. Any other interpretation is evidence of partisan wishfulfillment analysis.
For the record, I have consistently maintained that Biden did not win any form of governing mandate in 2020. The message voters sent in 2020 was only that they were not ready for another four years of Trump after suffering through the first 10 months of COVID-19 and the civil unrest following the murder of George Floyd.
President Biden massively misread the 2020 results and foolishly allowed the progressive wing of his party to pursue an extremely ambitious legislative agenda as if he had received a true electoral rout and mandate. Your comments and what we are already seeing in the first week after the election suggest that President-elect Trump is about to make the exact same mistaken interpretation of his election results and also overplay his political hand.
This will result in an ever-so-predictable backlash in the 2026 midterms, with the most favorable Senate map of the three Senate cycles and a House with only a very narrow Republican margin. This is a clear recipe for swinging both houses of Congress, much like the 2006 midterm cycle.
The big question is whether the Democratic Party can find a fresh new face with a fresh new vision for the party, like Obama provided in 2008. My two best candidates to fulfill this role are Mark Cuban or Jamie Dimon, both highly respected, politically savvy, high-profile public figures with no allegiance or baggage from legacy Democratic politics and the freedom to redefine the image of the party. Both are extremely successful businessmen with strong centrist credentials.
Even if Trump were overwhelmingly popular odds are that the Dems would take the House in 2026. That's just the normal pattern for the first midterm after a presidential election--see Clinton, Obama, Trump and Biden.
In the past, a party flipping the WH by winning both the electoral and popular votes also has long coattails and pick up lots of House seats. And then the midterms are a regression to the mean.
But so far this decade that is not happening. The GOP picked up 5 seats in 2020. And then another 5 in 2022. And this time they will be right around net zero. We're around a stability point. So I think there would have to be an unusually strong pro or anti GOP wave for 2026 to see much of a swich either way. Which means the Democrats chances of flipping the House in 2026 is probably less than, or no better than, 50/50. (Maybe 50/50 since the party out of power may be more likely to show up at midterms. But there just not as many swing districts as in prior decades.)
This is the best take I’ve seen anywhere on the internet about the last two elections. (and I don’t just say that because you’re predicting a Dem win in 2026!). Thanks for sharing.
Didn’t Harris do better than Biden in the counties around Atlanta, in western North Carolina, on the northwest tip of Michigan’s lower peninsula, and several other regions?
This was a 2004 style election. A clear win, but nothing like “massive”. There hasn’t been a “massive” win since 1984. This is smaller than Obama’s 2008 win, which was the only large win in decades.
The prior election is mostly irrelevant here. I say "mostly" because you do have to account for factors like polarization; victory margins on both sides are much smaller today than they used to be.
But you don't get bonus points for improving on your previous showing. And you certainly shouldn't assume those same trends will continue. Trump was the face of the pandemic in 2020. Biden and Harris were the face of inflation in 2024. The Republican nominee in '28 will be the face of whatever is top of mind that year -- good or bad.
Maaaaybe. Elections are about more than one thing--the Trump team is convinced that their best ad was the one attacking Harris for supporting sex change operations for illegal immigrants in federal custody. I would not be surprised if the Dems are out of the executive until they pull a Sista Souljah and put some distance between themselves and trans activists: "No boys in girls' sports".
I disagree with your second half. No chance the low prop voters turn out for a RINO like Nikki. In fact, I'm doubtful the low prop voters will turn out for anyone besides Trump. That's a worry the GOP will need to address sooner rather than alter.
I wouldn't call Haley a RINO - she is a proud graduate of a segregation academy, and is definitely MAGA adjacent. If Haley and people like her leave the Rs the GOP will be in a world of hurt.
That is accurate. But Nate need to lower the ratings for left wing polls of morning consult, Washington post, quinipiac the same way he does for right wing polls of trafalgar, Rasmussen. He was actually saved a little by right wing pollsters.
But they were more right in 2020. Quinipiac, Washington post and morning consult were more wrong in 2020 and now in 2024. So.shouldnt they be weighted down going forward as well?
He gave WaPo an A+ and Quinnipiac an A-. Both polls were trash in 2020 and 2024. That alone makes me question Nate's capabilities. If I didn't tell you the names of the polls but just showed you how much they were off by, and how often they favored Dems, you'd say toss them out.
Do you have any justification for why he added 1 point to the popular vote estimate his own model spit out in order to "sync them up" with her performance in the battleground states?
It was an entirely unscientific endeavor, taking a stab that national polls were on the aggregate underestimating Kamala because of disproportionately better battleground polling when the simpler answer could have been that the Pop vote EC bias disappeared (a point he conceded in follow up)
None of this is entirely mathematical, scientific or objective. To some degree his own model does not rely only on polling. He himself states there's some fundamentals integrated into it
The simple average of polls at RCP has performed better than Silver's weighted model for three presidential elections in a row I believe. They're poll based too--that's not the issue.
I can read your comments (better than you can, apparently). You said lots of people would tell you to just leave. I didn’t want you to be wrong about that as you are about so much else. You’re welcome.
This was a clear trump win, but you guys need to stop convincing yourself it was some "massive" win. Reps are acting the same right now as Dems did in 2020 and I don't think it will end well for them.
It was massive by most metrics. First PV win by a GOP since 2004. He won all the swing states, increased his margins in FL and TX, and cut the D lead in blue states. Kamala did not do better than Biden in a single county. That's astounding. But you're right, 2026 could easily flip the House back to D.
TLDR, but did you explain somewhere in there how polls or the model were supposed to be "wrong" while getting the outcome right in the fat part of the distribution/calling the most likely state map?
Anybody with an ounce of common sense should be able to look at new voters registrations in PA for September and October and and view those as suggestive.
While you make several cogent and useful observations and points, your description of a large polling error and the conclusion that poll data should be deemphasized in favor of other data sources is poorly supported.
The states with the most robust polling data had the most accurate vote result projections from the Silver Bulletin model. This is most clearly demonstrated by comparing the model's vote projecting for the seven battleground states, which were by far the most heavily polled states, with how accurate the model's vote projecting was in the other 43 states. The actual results in those seven states were all between a 1% and 3% delta from the projected final vote margin. By comparison, the states with much less polling data averaged about a 6% delta from the Silver Bulletin forecast margin.
If the Silver Bulletin model were overdependent on poll data, one would expect the exact opposite pattern.
I appreciate and value your extremely well-considered and written post-mortem analysis of the election. The comment section will be all the poorer with your absence.
Appreciate your kind words. One of my major issues is how Nate weighs certain pollsters. Both Quinnipiac and Washington Post were horribly off in 2020, yet he rates them A+ and A- respectively. Both polled in error favoring Dems 100% of the time. Polls that bad should be tossed out, not given overweighting. They were horribly off again. Until Nate becomes less partisan and acknowledges that the "right wing" pollsters were far more accurate, his model will always be left leaning.
"All the signs were there for a massive Trump win." -- debatable. Here is a conversation I had on the afternoon of November 5.
D: I agree with some of the things he (Nate Silver) said are weird about the polls. Like a lot that have results inconsistent with crosstabs and a statistically abnormal number making it tied or a 1-point race.
A: Yeah...
D: Like Trump getting 20% of the Black vote and 40% of the Hispanic vote seems really out of line with a tie, unless there's really a massive counter realignment among suburban voters... And then, what are the chances that two big vote swings like that would be the same size...
A: In 9th grade... (story about flipping coins and faking data)
D: I wouldn't be shocked to see either candidate win by like 4 points. I think it's really hard to predict and poll and pollsters are just copping out a bit, then it becomes GIGO to Nate's model.
The point of this story? There were certainly some signs for a solid Trump win. There are other signs that Harris would win. I don't think Trump winning by 1.5 is that earth-shattering compared to my expectations a week ago (that were guided by Nate among others), I was actually far more shocked in 2020 because I thought he was going to lose by 7-8 points and actually believed the pollsters had adequately corrected then for 2016.
You were supposed to flip a coin 100 times and then record how many times it came up heads/tails, and most of the groups in the class came up with exactly 50 of each. A said that 9th graders didn't know how to fake their data in believable way.
If the best one can do is say "it's 50/50", I'd argue there's no value there at all. There was never a chance that Harris would win by 4. That's my entire point.
I'm actually a consistent winner in low limit poker, and I made out quite profitably from betting this election. Doubt I need advice from you, but thanks.
The model said 50/50. The question is whether the model was actually reflective of reality. Given the results of the election I think you can make a pretty strong case that the answer is no.
No. I think this was a demographics election, meaning we are seeing a fundamental reshaping of the political landscape. That probably started years ago and we are just now seeing the wave breaking. But the polling didn't really pick it up and Silver's model didn't either.
I suspect that what won the election for Trump was demographic shifts, and demographic change is like a glacier. Very slow but massive.
The shift for Hispanic men started years ago. The polling didn't pick it up because polling is not a good instrument for detecting that kind of change. In other words we're seeing the limits of polling, and as a consequence the limits of modeling based on polling.
Nate had the popular vote at D+1, and also said that if the popular vote was "between D+1 and D+2" that Trump had a 66.9% chance of winning the election.
We now know there was never a chance that the election would be tied, or that Trump would win by 3, or that Harris would win by 5. You can either say the prediction was total BS, or you can ask yourself if someone making a 50/50 prediction is right, roughly 50% of the time or if they are consistently way off.
I guess that's more of a philosophical question about determinism. My view is, there is one outcome that is actually going to happen, and models use incomplete data to make a best guess as to the likelihood of different outcomes, since we lack omniscience.
In all seriousness, you seem like an intelligent person, certainly, but I think you’re being a bit too confident about what are essentially just vibes.
Not vibes, trends. Party ID which has almost perfect correlation to election results. Right track/wrong track, again with almost perfect correlation. Republican registration trends in key swing states. Nate is like the blind man feeling the trunk of the elephant, while ignoring the other parts.
Question for Nate: If Trump does not in fact declare himself God-Emperor for life, will you do a public mea culpa for all your alarmism about “our sacred democracy!” over the years?
Question for you: do you think that Trump will pardon the people who stormed the capitol? Do you think Trump will stop lying about electoral fraud?
Do you think idiots like yourself will ever stop strawmanning serious criticism? Or will you rationalize each step away from the principles on which the country was founded?
Only idiots like you keep crying wolf about the authoritarianism that never came, while people in actual brutal regimes are suppressed on a regular basis
Jan 2028 will come and nothing will happen. You can blame your “democracy is dying” message for your
The convictions for the Jan 6th rioters were disproportionate to the penalties (or lack thereof) handed out to previous rioters, such as the Pussy Protest rioters who also trespassed in the Capitol. So yes, justice demands that those rioters now be pardoned.
Disagree with your characterization, but people brainwashed by the MSNBC echo chamber will be unable to grasp the nuance. Nobody was armed. The only person killed was the protestor who was shot point-blank by a Capitol cop for no reason. It was a riot, it was vandalism, but it was not an "insurrection."
There was no serious organized attempt to seize control of the Capitol. Are there guards in the Capitol? Are those guards armed? If so that would imply that any "insurrectionists" would require firearms themselves.
Prior to J6 numerous BLM protests morphed into riots at night after the families went home. J6 is just a continuation of that same general pattern--another riot in a year of riots.
They didn't plan very well in that case. Since the Capitol is protected by armed guards the failure to bring in their own firearms would seem to be a fatal flaw.
I think pardons for at least some of the J6 prisoners is pretty much guaranteed. I am also skeptical that the bulk of the voting public cares about recess appointments.
Whether or not the majority of the public views something as a threat to democracy may be a good indicator as to whether or not it's actually a threat to democracy.
The definition of democracy is no more subject to democratic rule than the definition of monarchy is subject to monarchical rule.
Yes, language is descriptive and can change. But democracy is not a synonym for "good". People can and sometimes do choose to reject democracy.
Ironically, trying to prevent them from rejecting democracy would itself be inherently undemocratic. Some states even choose to do this; see the modern German state.
Trump has promised to "root out" the "vermin" in the free press who are "enemies of the people". He hasn't even been nominated yet and you are already calling him a liar. Tsk tsk.
Yes, and you can find an endless list of equivalent quotes from Democrats about their plans. Stop pretending you really believe that heated rhetoric should be taken literally when you know full well it's just talk. It makes you look foolish and alienates the people you need to convince.
Is it just talk? I think it is reasonable enough to consider that someone might do what they said they would do. I am personally going to wait and see. If he does in fact try and silence the press will you be on his side or on the side of liberty?
I think if he denaturalizes and deports legal Americans like those in Springfield that's already fascist but I guess you don't draw the line until he literally cancels elections. You think the government asking Facebook to take down a story while Trump controls it is worse than the owner of Twitter endorsing trump, making it a far right run platform, pushing his own tweets to all accounts, and paying people a million dollars to vote Republican.
“the owner of Twitter endorsing trump, making it a far right run platform”
This is ridiculous. Why will you never learn that these deranged accusations about the “far right” alienate people from your coalition every time you say it?
Yeah like he's the kind of guy who takes a lot of crap from the left for not being alarmist enough and sane-washing the right (I believe, largely unfairly).
He is less extreme than some of the Democrats' utter lunatics, especially nowadays. But I remember listening to, I think it was the final Model Talk of the 2020 campaign, and rolling my eyes back into my skull at hearing Nate say that it might be the last ever election if Trump won. And even on this blog he has made many silly statements about “protecting democracy” and so on.
Elon Musk, the wealthiest and most powerful man in the world, recently said that people who disagree with him about specific political issues belong in jail. I am personally more with Voltaire, who famously said, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." Voltaire probably didn't say that, but he would have agreed.
Do you agree that political speech that offends Elon Musk should lead to jail time?
Whether Trump declares himself "God-Emperor" or not is irrelevant. He has given the uninformed portion of the American electorate permission to act out in public, rather than just at a bar. That is enough damage to democracy.
Nate, as a well meaning former blue dog democrat (before Reagan and achieving enlightenment), I have seen very little that indicates much of the democrat leadership has learned much of anything. Discounting completely the internal foodfight between Pelosi, Biden, and Harris, democrats continue to seem wedded to this racist, misogynist, trans America nonsense that is killing them. I hasten to add this is not just a messaging thing. This is a belief pattern that really is at odds with "normal" Americans. What the party ignores to its great peril is that most working and middle class Americans, regardless of "identity," do not view their country through the prism of grievance. What Trump did was offer them (including Hispanics economically fearful of uncontrolled emigration and culturally wary of wokism) the opportunity to embrace that without fear of condemnation. Look at those red totals in blue bastions. Rather than a blip on a timeline of the march of progressive presidential power, this feels to me much more like an inflection point such as 1968.
I’ve been quite consistent that the fundamentals of this election seemed quite anti incumbent. That other people with my political persuasion didn’t seem to agree is their own business.
There is a long trend line of white america hating, then coexisting, and finally accepting minorities.
Sure there are large pockets of racism, misogyny, and homophobia, but advocating these positions can end careers in most of the country.
Transphobia will go the same way eventually.
It is just the most recent wedge issue that the Republicans have stirred up to capture headlines and scare people who are so isolated that they haven't met a transgender person (or don't know that they have).
Eventually Republicans will run out of people to demonize, and will have to compete on actual policies.
There is not a "normal" parent in this country who wants their daughter competing physically in an athletic event or sharing a locker room with a man pretending he is a woman. Democrats can decide as they will, but that will never be winning argument with any parent with the remotest bit of common sense or protective love of their child. They will also find it impossible to find a majority of parents who believe cutting healthy body parts off minors without their permission is anything but abhorrent. If the democrats want those to be the hills they wish to die upon, then far be it from me to prevent it.
The question is whether parents have the best interests of their children at heart (Munchausen syndrome by proxy) or whether they're fully informed in the first place.
Regardless, no transexual should be competing in a women's sports league.
My problem on trans vs. an issue like gay marriage a few years ago where I was 100% pro, is that with a lot of trans issues there are actual victims to point to. Sorry if I thought it was a joke that that Algerian won a gold medal, or that the same thing is supposed to happen in miniature to women's sports universally. It didn't make me vote for Trump but I honestly don't get people who think that kind of thing is a good hill to die on.
Not to mention, I've seen way too many people under 18 change their mind about tattoos or even what clothes to wear in the morning, and personally known young people who have been all over the place on their gender identity. I'm not very comfortable with minors changing their physical identity, especially when it feels like a a lot of the research around this is very politically motivated (again there's an actual "victim" to point to here unlike with gay marriage, pot legalization, whatever).
I think trans issues will be more like school busing than gay marriage in 30 years. i.e. shoved into a memory hole until only people over 40 or 50 even remember the debate. Obviously I'm not talking about the actual physical safety of trans people or the rights of adults to do what they please with their lives -- those are issues I will always stand up for. But with some of the trans issues they not only have been wrong on the merits, but they have kind of tarred the Democrats with wacky ideas and helped facilitate Trump's comeback. Sorry if I feel that way.
First, the Algerian boxer wasn’t trans - she just had a masculine-looking face and people assumed she was trans. For reference, I’m a trans woman who has mixed feelings about trans women competing in women’s sports (studies have shown that trans women on estrogen have the same muscle mass as non-trans women, but they can still benefit from a larger bone structure in some sports). However, apart from wanting to exclude trans women, none of the conservative people I’ve talked to seem to genuinely care about women’s sports, and most don’t even watch women’s sports at all. If they care about supporting women, why aren’t conservative activists demanding that female professional athletes be paid equally to male professional athletes?
"why aren’t conservative activists demanding that female professional athletes be paid equally to male professional athletes?"
Possibly because they believe in market forces, and that female athlete pay will rise as ticket sales, merch sales, and viewer ratings rise? We are already seeing that with respect to Caitlin Clark in the WNBA.
After doing more research in the last 15 minutes than the rest of my life combined, I honestly have no clue. Are right-wingers flooding the zone on this for propaganda purposes, or are lefties being disingenuous by conflating the lack of proof that she is XY with a zero probability of her being XY? It seems like it would be very easy to release a test independent of the IBA to put this matter to rest.
The Algerian boxer is XY. The news came out the other day. She probably has 5-ARD, in which male babies have internal testes and are mistaken for girls. But they still produce testosterone and as adults have male strength. Check her photo at the Guardian.
The question I'm more interested in is how the right seems to apply the same logic to girls' and women's sports regardless of the organizing body or level of competition.
To me, there is a clear political question as to whether transgender girls should be permitted to compete against cisgender girls in sports that are funded by public tax dollars (e.g., junior high and high school athletic competitions, most collegiate athletics).
As a parent of a cisgender girl athlete I think the default should be that as many kids as possible should be permitted to compete in athletics at the junior high and high school levels. We want more kids playing sports -- not fewer. The evidence of domination by transgender girls just isn't there to suggest that they are somehow inhibiting the ability of cisgender girls from participating or competing.
Given that we're in a transition phase where we are really learning about the puts and takes, I think the thing to do is to try to find an answer that has the smallest potential for harm. So then you ask yourself, which is the bigger harm -- preventing a kid from participating at all or *potentially* requiring a kid to compete against an athlete who is taller, faster, or stronger? Seems like the answer is pretty obvious to me.
Quite aside from that, though, you see the same arguments being made w/r/t professional competitions (e.g., the example in these comments about the Olympian who many believed to be a trans woman). This makes no sense to me, as it would seem as though the position of the right would, by default, be that the organizing body should be free to act in its own self interest and would-be customers/viewers/fans are free to either consume the content or not. In short, I guess I'm saying that the fact that professional examples are continually brought up makes it clear that this is really more a manufactured culture war issue than it is a good faith policy argument that's being made.
Nope, this incident came up in three different conversations I was involved with and no one ever mentioned that. Not being a huge boxing fan I just assumed that if there were 10 people of all different political persuasions not challenging the premise that she was a trans man, it didn't come up on my radar as something to check for as potential misinformation.
This is part of the problem with all the hysteria about trans women in sports. It results in misinformation and hateful attacks against people like this Algerian boxer, whose sin is apparently that she is too strong and fit to compete in athletics. It wasn’t cast in a trans lens, but Serena Williams was similarly attacked early in her tennis career.
Okay, but now that I actually read about this more, there's good reason to suspect that even if she was not an XX woman, the IOC would not have detected that with their current procedures. I understand the IBA is not the most reliable source with their two tests, but I don't see any proof anywhere else that she isn't XY. She took a third test, independently, and didn't voluntarily release those results, and when they were leaking (going yet another layer down and assuming the leaker was honest), it seems like she was a male after all.
This is a recurring pattern I see where certain things become so politicized that it's virtually impossible for there to be a neutral party, but just using Bayesian priors, it seems unlikely that her team wouldn't release something to put this story to rest, if indeed those tests existed. It seems more likely that if they aren't releasing exculpatory evidence, it's because that evidence doesn't exist.
Republicans have been about policy from day one. You might not like their policies, but they have had a consistent platform unlike the Dems which at the moment can't figure out what their own constituency is.
I think Democrats are more effective when they argue that Republicans *do* have policy. Many of their actual policies (for better or worse) aren't very popular. Or when they did, they said "Project 2025" a lot which is more of a dog-whistle to MSNBC viewers than something that an average voter will understand.
Calling out massive tax cuts to the rich, or that Republicans want to slash financial regulation and bring back the 2008 crisis, I think resonates a lot more with the average schmuck who doesn't follow a lot of politics (and these things are incidentally a part of Project 2025, but much more understandable I think than just saying "Project 2025").
The two parties have traded bases. The GOP now represents the working class, as the Democrats discovered last week to their regret. It's understandable that the platforms have shifted.
I support trans rights and think she was selfish and what she did set back trans rights by decades.
Trying to pretend it isn't an issue is not going to work. Anyone who cares about trans rights and/or winning elections needs to say that trans women can't play on teams with cis women.
I think there is a simple solution - just RENAME the teams "Assigned Male at Birth - All Genders" and "Assigned Female at Birth - All Genders." This makes it explicit that all genders are welcome on any team, and the teams are just divided based on assigned sex at birth.
I agree with what most but not the conclusion. Trump will overstep and lose support. He doesn't have anyone around him to tell him he is going too far.
It is humorous that you think the IBA was protecting her privacy. Somehow idiots like you and me found out about their decision/conclusion, which remains unsupported by any evidence. You presumably feel differently, but I am not interested living in a world where “authorities” like the IBA (or the government) would ban people and then say they can’t provide the evidence because they are protecting the banned person’s privacy. It is absurd on its face and obvious to anyone who thinks about it for two seconds. Which is why the IBA has been discredited.
The IBA reputation has been deteriorating for a long time - allegations of corruption, financial mismanagement and weakness, integrity of officiating and scoring. Since the current leader (Kremlev) was elected in 2020, concerns have increased further, particularly over ties between the organization and the Russian government/Putin. In June 2023, the IBA was removed from the Olympic movement. It isn’t a coincidence that the IBA action against Khelif was taken after she defeated two top Russian boxers.
1) The extreme left is not going away and wokeness will stay very much alive, and this will continue to antagonize the moderate Democrats and a lot of voters.
2) The names for the Democrats you have mentioned (none of them are moderates) have some alignment with the extreme left which will cause them major problems.
3) Also, there is some major infighting with the Democratic Party will could cause some headaches.
4) The Republicans will fight tooth and nail to keep the majorities in both houses of Congress.
5) The Republican Party (not Trump) is now hyper focused on the 2026 mid-terms and are aware of the lack of success for the party in power in a second term Presidency.
6) The Republican Party will do everything to maintain their new multi-cultural coalition.
7) The Democrats are hoping the Republicans will stumble which will give a fighting chance to re-gain the White House.
8) If Republicans have a modicum of success, they have a good chance in the 2026 mid-terms.
None of those people are anywhere near "extreme left", except perhaps AOC, and she is moderating her positions somewhat as Nate points out about the Squad.
I'm sure that Moulton had some strong formal policy that forced his employees to make their children play sports, and especially that girls had to play "against boys".
Oh wait, no such policy existed?
The Former CoS is grandstanding about an issue. Probably teeing up a run for office and wanted the headline.
Oh Trump started railing against the "radical left" years ago. There are still lots of Republicans who genuinely think antifa is, like, a group that dems think or care about. It's disheartening how effective it is.
For republicans reading, the same is true of dems calling every republican racist/bigots/anti-American/etc. It is transparently the result of successful propaganda.
Until I'm convinced that the Hispanic shift is "over" and that Hispanics won't just vote 57-43 Republican in 2028, then I view Nate's column as kind of an optimistic scenario for Dems. Since Dems largely struck out on moving the burbs more to their side, or at best are doing so much more slowly, they are in a world of trouble if the same trends from 2020-24 largely continue.
I'll confess straight up, I don't know enough about Hispanics to recommend wth to do, but obviously whatever they did the last four years didn't work. And they needed to do much, much better in suburban areas to vindicate this fluffy, social issue-focused, cosmopolitan, moderate-targeted strategy they ran with in 2024.
Unfortunately the real answer is that the Dems are fucked royally thanks to their own strategy of flooding the country with migrants. Hispanics are more conservative than whites. Most of Latin America is having a right wing renaissance now.
I'm a dem, but I see a strong silver-lining to this. I feel vaguely "betrayed" (in a very mild and abstract sense) that Hispanics have little loyalty to the party that has defended them, BUT I would love for this to represent a transition from the GOP seeing these demographic groups as "them" to seeing them as "us". Really, this is how it always should have been. These immigrants are mostly conservative and religious -- now imagine if republicans recognized the opportunity they've been wasting all this time and started advocating for secure borders AND humane treatment AND good paths to citizenship. It might weaken the democratic party, but for me at least it's much more important that the US embrace as a whole the value that immigrants have and have always had for this country.
And then Republicans have even think... hmm, maybe if we don't like abortion, we should start advocating for better sex ed, more available birth control, stricter requirements for child support, and more programs to help single mothers.
Honestly, there's a reality where Republicans are the party of compassion purely out of self-interest and ideological integrity. That would be wonderful to see. I could see myself being tempted by a party like that.
The Dems haven't defended Latinos, though. Latinos are very pro-life and don't like illegals, who make them look bad. They are very Catholic so why would they want better sex ed or birth control or subsidizing single mothers?
Here's an idea - how about we only help mothers who are married, to discourage single mothers and encourage marriage?
"Paths to citizenship" means amnesty, a terrible and unethical idea that Latino citizens are against!
Part of me thinks... he won the popular vote. Unless I'm so arrogant that I believe they're all idiots, I have to acknowledge that MAYBE they're right and Trump doesn't really mean the crazy things he says and his policies won't actually explode catastrophically.
I can't just abandon my senses and forget that he's a consummate narcissist, but who knows. Maybe it won't be so bad. I'll take one day at a time.
Interesting you say you see a lot of soul searching on the Left. I hope that's true but my feed is filled with blame. I find all the blame aimed at my generation (GenX) to be the most weird to hear. Like hey wow people are paying attention to my generation :).
Probably just an artifact of the liberal Facebook groups I'm on.
I think it depends on who you listen to. Nate probably listens to moderate Dems, they are doing soul searching. The activists and MSM types, and the social media/reddit crazies are all in on the blame game. Dirty sexist latinx men!
Yeah im not sure the message from the last 8 years is that this country won't elect women to the white house. A woman has been on the ballot every election cycle, and the one with the lowest approval ratings won the popular vote at the top of the ticket, and in both times with a female candidate, they came close enough in the key swing states and the popular vote that i'm overall skeptical that a better candidate or climate can't win.
Female candidates have gotten closer to the white house than any non-white candidate ever did pre-obama.
These are the persuadable swing voters, obviously. Perhaps the Democratic Party will find another substantial group of the electorate that will change their mind, but I don’t know who that might be. Others have suggested working class voters that are economically populist but conservative socially (e.g., the old New Deal voters). Biden gave them a lot economically but they still didn’t vote for Harris.
Ultimately it will come down to how well the Republicans rule, which is how it should be. If Trump picks up House seats in 2026, then a major reordering of the party should be on the table. Failing that, the Democrats should stop nominating women for President.
Totally. They’re acting like this is some news flash in 2024. No. Our generation has leaned red since Red Dawn, which as I’m typing that I’m realizing is a pretty meta sentence.
are those the stats? All my near age friends lean left at the very least but again that might just be me. Most of my friends are however somewhat anti authority and the Democratic Party has gone pretty heavy on its governing philosophy. I'd love to see really stats on all this and not just my anecdotal experience.
50-64 year olds got Trump the popular vote. Even if Trump had lost that demographic he could have still pulled off an EC win with enough support from Hispanics, who trend younger.
Now imagine being a white GenX libertarian man like me. And I frickin' voted for Harris!
Of course, GenX only enters the chat when they are called on the carpet.
The Dems really need to STOP blaming and shaming half the electorate if they want their votes next time. Time for them to start winning hearts and minds.
Jon Stewart showed some democratic ads that painted a pretty grim picture of how much democratic messaging amounted to "no I am not the things they said I was!" I hope we democrats remember our identity as a party that stands FOR things, not just against them.
Regarding the issue of “wokeness” and identity politics, I’d argue there’s a big gap between Harris’s campaign this year (she didn’t mention LGBT issues at all and rarely brought up her gender/race) and authors of Salon articles and TikTok creators. And I’d argue that the “anti-woke” backlash is more due to the unelected content creators than the actual words or actions of Democratic elected officials.
sister souljah wasn't an elected Democratic official either. Not saying crazy stuff yourself isn't enough, you need to publicly rebuke and disavow the crazies in your camp, and unlike Clinton, Harris didn't dare do that. Harris tried to please everyone and it failed.
“One of the reasons that there tends to be a lot of mean-reversion in elections — majorities aren’t held for very long these days — is because healthy political parties react to their losses.”
While I agree in the abstract, it’s not at all clear the GOP did this between 2020 and 2024. And yet look at the results.
The results indicate that Trump probably would've lost absent inflation. He got very, very lucky that he ran in an environment that was overwhelmingly hostile to incumbent parties worldwide. If you plop this same election down in 2000, 2004, 2012, 2016, or 2020 he probably doesn't pull it out.
Very possible! Although most incumbents got an approval bump from it. The results basically matched the polls in February 2020, he may have been on track to lose this whole time. Biden looked on track to lose to Trump basically since inflation set in.
Very very lucky really? Moving the goalposts? Did not hear any of this last few months. Only heard that he was the most horrible candidate and Harris would win easily. I could counteract that he was unlucky due to Covid and lost in 2020.
No worries! Your point about Covid is valid, I just don’t think it invalidates the broader point that the gop didn’t really change after losing all three chambers in 2020.
I think Dems are way better off in 2026 than 2028. Times have changed and they dominate the higher-engagement voters now. I could even see something like a 1994/96 combo coming where Dems do really, really well in 2026 and then mistakenly think that means they can do business as usual in 2028. Something like that happened at a smaller scale between 2022/24.
I agree with you, I think the thing working to Dems advantage in 2028 will be that Vance will probably be the nominee and democrats will probably nominate a change candidate who can turn the page on the last decade and a half in politics, which voters will probably be eager to do.
Regarding the tendency for Democrats to ostracize people that only half-agree with them, I feel like a big part of that is that the more individualistic Republicans, in general, have a tendency to lean towards "I'm entitled to my opinion" even when discussing things that are clearly not a matter of opinion (e.g. climate change, "immigrant crime," vaccines, etc.), whereas the more technocratic Democrats tend to favor more of a "follow the experts" approach even on issues that are clearly matters of opinion, where they tend to treat the personal biases of academics and such as matters of fact (most infamously the "racism is a public health emergency" PSA). So as a result of that (painting very broadly of course), Republicans have an easier time half-agreeing with people because they view disagreement as a difference of opinion whereas Democrats are more likely to view it as someone else being WRONG. So it's less an issue of one side being more tolerant than the other than it is both sides fundamentally misunderstanding the difference between a fact and an opinion, which leads to an unbalanced impact on places like Twitter. I have no idea how to address that or if I'm even right, but it seems like there might be something there, anyway.
"Republicans have an easier time half-agreeing with people because they view disagreement as a difference of opinion whereas Democrats are more likely to view it as someone else being WRONG."
At the risk of proving your point, that statement sounds absolutely insane to me. I can think of no evidence whatsoever to indicate that one party is more rational or capable of distinguishing fact from opinion than the other. Both parties put forth a full spectrum of narratives that appeal to the full spectrum of their constituents, with adjacent (meaning similarly-polarized) narratives neatly bundled for use in echo chambers intended to limit political drift. These narratives range from genuine ideological positions to outright lies. If you are willing to accept any narrative or set of narratives as representative of the party as a whole, you will be able to convince yourself of nearly anything--and that is, itself, its own subset of narratives, the purpose of which is to subtly position the other party as fundamentally lacking in some desirable trait.
"both sides fundamentally misunderstanding the difference between a fact and an opinion, which leads to an unbalanced impact on places like Twitter"
I agree with this as much as I disagreed with the previous statement.
"I have no idea how to address that or if I'm even right, but it seems like there might be something there, anyway."
My deep conviction is that real change will only come when/if people are are frequently exposed to other opinions and viewpoints in their real lives -- in a space that encourages empathy, compassion, a desire for connection, and a recognition of common ground. Unfortunately, I see a lot more "let's boycott the stores owned by our political rivals" than "let's take every opportunity to humanize those that people seeking to accumulate money and power would have me dehumanize."
I probably should have put a bit more emphasis on the "in general." Obviously there is a very wide range of viewpoints among individuals. But I don't think many would argue against the idea that Democrats have recently been leaning into a very technocratic/intellectualist direction, whereas Republicans have recently been leaning into a very anti-establishment, anti-intellectualist direction. Obviously there are individuals who don't fit that narrative, but as a whole that seems to be the direction they're pulling, and the education gap is quantitative evidence of that. So my hypothesis is that, given Nate's observation that Republicans have an easier time half-agreeing than Democrats (this may not in itself be accurate but I would say that personally--as a Democrat myself--my own observations tend to align with that), and given that we agree that both sides have difficulty differentiating between fact and opinion, I would guess that the deference to experts that is more common among Democrats might lead some to assume that because a so-called expert has an opinion then that opinion is fact, whereas with the distrust of institutions that Republicans tend to have, they might be more inclined to believe that their opinion is as good as anyone else's even on matters of established fact. Obviously one could come up with counter-arguments (religion being an obvious one), and it's just a hypothesis, but in any case that's where my reasoning came from.
I do agree that it's important to be exposed to different viewpoints, and one of the things that I think isn't talked about enough is how the geographic segregation of political beliefs harms our ability to meet in the middle and allows politicians to distract us by pitting us against each other. Maybe counterintuitively Trump's improvement from 2020 in places like California and New York will help with that.
After Dems being insufferable for the last 8 years it feels like its shifting and Republicans are becoming the more "whiny" party. Silver clearly thought trump would win but because he didn't say he was guaranteed to win they are butt hurt and retreating to the Fox News echo chamber.
Quick typo check in your "Battle for the House" table (only because it's someone's name) - the elected representative in VA-10 is "Subramanyam", not "Subrananyam".
Nancy fkn Pelosi and her “this was not a repudiation of the Democratic Party” can go straight to hell. Our party leadership is the cronyist of cronyism and our loud online cohort are the most self defeating idiots that exist. Our party needs a full scale makeover.
And I didn’t even get to the most ineffective nincompoop in party leadership, chuck shumer.
Here’s an idea DNC - let us have the first actually competitive primary in 20 years in 2028? Wild idea right?! Instead of clearing the field for your hand picked crony of the 1990’s whose “turn it is to be president.”
If your party's leaders are corrupt cronies and your party's members are self-defeating idiots, have you considered that maybe you're in the wrong party?
Bernie did by far the best in the first few states while mayor Pete was second. Coincidentally every centrist then dropped out and endorsed Biden while Warren stayed in and split the vote with Bernie. Pete then got a cabinet position and klobuchar in Senate leadership. Truly a coincidence, nothing behind the scenes at all!
i’m not sure what you’re insinuating. Joe Biden absolutely crushed Sanders in South Carolina, and the party quite understandably united behind the centrist with the highest name recognition and best immediate prospects for victory in 2020. And Joe Biden, you may recall, did in fact win the general election.
Isn't that.. how that's supposed to work? Are you suggesting Bernie deserved to win because moderate democrats were 'supposed' to split their votes amongst Biden, Pete, and co? A candidate who wins because of vote splitting is not a candidate who deserves it.
I'm saying there's nothing "behind the scenes" about it. They endorsed Biden publicly, that's as "in the open" as you can be – again, that's how [first past the post] voting is SUPPOSED to work.
I think your anger at Pelosi is misplaced. Not only did she know Biden was not the person to lead us to victory, she also thought the same about Kamala Harris.
Pelosi made the very valid point that the results in the House indicate that voters are not anti-Democratic party, especially given the national presidential vote.
Isn't this the best year for House Republicans in a presidential year since the 1920's? The R's have a pretty sizable lead in the national House vote, larger than Trump's. It's not showing up in the final tally of seats though because they are wasting votes by winning with a greater than 50% margin.
2008 was no more a competitive primary than 2016 was. It was Hillary Clinton vs some guy running a populist groundswell against her both times. Neither of them featured anything like the competitive field that we had in 2004 and 2020.
Spoken like a true liberal elitist, Nate, your lengthy micro numerical analysis of how the Dems are going to come back in 2026 and that Trump will have a terrible 4 years as an unpopular president, you fail to mention the complete demise of the Democrat Party in the 2024 election and why that might be, and why it could still be true in future elections. The Democrats have completely lost the entirety of the working class people in America and I think they know it but won’t admit it, for to admit it they’d have to do something about it and the ruling party elites don’t want to lower themselves enough to come out and mingle with the hard working little people, the rednecks in the flyover states who keep this nation afloat, I don’t think they have the guts to change, which doesn’t bode well for them in the future. Sorry for the rant.
In a "wave" election where one party is arguably (though historically not for very long) crushed, the other party tends to win unexpectedly in lots of places. Not only do they win the presidency, but they also win a bunch of seats in congress and a few unexpected Senate seats. This...wasn't that. Yes, the Senate flipped, but the only really competitive Senate seat that the GOP flipped was Pennsylvania. The other three flips were in deep red states -- Montana, West Virginia, and Ohio. And on the House side, while the GOP will hang on to their majority, it's looking to be super tight (to the point where these GOP appointments Trump is making will make it tough for them to get anything done prior to those special elections), certainly a smaller majority than they have in the 118th congress.
Of course it will be hard for the GOP to get a lot done in the first few years, but better than the alternative by long shot, my only point being that the Democrat Party appeals to absolutely no one right now and until they win back some of middle America and the working class people, it doesn’t look promising for them in the near future. They’re going to need a complete overhaul in my opinion.
It’s 100% hyperbole, Eddie, commonly used to make a point. It’s just that Trump won 76 million people, but maybe next time the Dems, despite their bad policies, won’t vote for their party over working class Americans, although it won’t be easy to get them back now, sorry.
You shouldn’t use hyperbole to make a point in political debate. That’s what happened when Rs said eggs cost $10 a dozen. It was hyperbole, lies, disinformation. Trump and Vance wouldn’t have won without it. They lied to the working class. And the working class people who voted for T will soon see they were tricked and made a mistake. Just like the Arabs in Michigan.
Calm down Eddie, you need to get out more, maybe go to the grocery store to realize that prices did go up 25-30% since Biden got into office, when inflation was at 1.4% after Trump’s term and then was pushed up as high as 9.2% by Joe and Kamala. I will use whatever words I want to in any kind of a debate or at any time I want to and the fact that you sound like you’re within the ‘snowflake’ age range compared to my 50+ years, and you guys never did learn how to spell, let alone how to use words in a sentence, you’ll understand why your comments are meaningless, especially to someone who’s been through 20 times more elections than you. The democrat party needs to stop blaming everyone else, including ‘the Arabs’ for their huge loss and start looking within the party to find out what went so horribly wrong. Stay chill, Eddie.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t enough, was it? 😁 The Democrat Party’s policies were rejected on every important election issue except the abortion lie and the results showed that. Not going to get into back and forth’s with snowflakes over elections, when you’ve been through even a quarter the of elections I’ve been through, maybe your point will get through, but not until.
It’s a figure of speech in our country, Daniel, you should know that. The future of the Democrat Party looks very, very sad right now, they appeal to no one and I don’t think they have the guts to change their attitudes towards the working class people and middle class Americans, they’ve been caught in their elitist bubbles, looking to each other to blame rather than looking within themselves as to what went so wrong.
Yeah. Unfortunately the economy is in a good place, and the low information types who believe otherwise will credit Trump when they finally figure it out.
So it could be very similar to the Reagan cult.
Of course Reagan appointed competent administrators. Trump's sycophants may be able to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Prior to cancelling my paid sub, I’d like to share my thoughts despite the potential “just leave” comments that will inevitably come.
I’ve consistently been vocal on here that Trump was comfortably in the lead, that the mainstream polls were once again wrong, that Seltzer’s poll was going to miss horribly, and that Nate’s model is flawed. Because of that, I was ridiculed and called names, which is unbecoming in this type of a newsletter.
The reason I’m sharing my thoughts is the earnest hope that it will lead to future improvements in the Silver Bulletin.
For, despite being a critic of Nate’s, I’ve been following him for quite a while, enjoying the past 538 articles on politics, sports and society.
I’ve been a paid sub and even purchased his book.
All this to lay the groundwork and show I’m not a troll.
Other groundwork to lay is my background. I share this to blunt whatever stereotypes critics will make of anyone who is a Trump supporter, which I am one of.
Raised in Canada, lived in Southern California for 25 years. Bachelor’s in Poli Sci and Psych. MBA. Worked in the corporate world. For the past 20 years, founded and run a humble small business. Taiwanese-American.
I had high hopes for the Silver Bulletin, but as time went on and we approached Election Day, it was clear to me that what I was reading wasn’t what I was hoping for.
All the signs were there for a massive Trump win. Yes, Nate acknowledged the possibility as much, but his algorithm really didn’t as shown by his 50/50 result after tens of thousands of simulations.
The fatal flaw, from my humble opinion, is his reliance on polls. If the polls are wrong, his model will be wrong. I realize he incorporates other factors, but the primary driver are the polls.
And this cycle, again, the “right wing” polls were all extremely accurate.
The news media and university polls missed…some by quite a bit. Again.
But honestly, you didn’t need these polls to know Trump was a heavy favorite.
All the key indicators pointed to Trump having the massive advantage:
-Wrong track was at 28%. As Harry Enten pointed out, no president wins with those numbers.
-Party ID by Pew and Gallup showed a net swing from D+4 to R+3. That’s 7 points. Party ID has a strong correlation with who wins.
-Economy / cost of living, and immigration were consistently the top issues, which Harris ran behind on.
-Harris simply would never do the same or better than Biden in the Rust Belt. Scranton Joe vs far left California Kamala. That alone should have disqualified her from consideration to run.
-Harris could never detach herself from the horrible numbers of Biden. She was trying to convince voters she will bring change, but could never answer the fundamental question of why she didn’t enact change as VP.
Then as the polls rolled out, we consistently saw Trump overperforming his 2020 numbers by 4 to 10 points.
We saw these in swing states but also in blue states.
We saw him tie the national average, which signaled a massive EC victory.
We saw him up with almost every demo: blacks, hispanics, Catholics, Jews, Arabs/Muslims, union workers, young men.
Add up all the above, and it was clear Trump should have been a 2-1 favorite at least, which coincidentally was about what the betting markets trended towards in the final days.
Yet despite all of the above, those on the left were oblivious and kept trotting out “advantages” Harris had which we now know were simply non-existent. Yet many on the left here, on blue X, commenters on Daily Kos or Slate, were convinced Harris was trending to a massive EC victory with states like FL and TX going blue.
Ann Seltzer’s historically disastrous poll that missed by an astonishing 16 points only added to their false bravado.
Because of the above, I saw an arbitrage opportunity to profit, and placed multiple bets on Kalshi.
I went 5 for 5 betting on: Trump to win, GOP to sweep Presidency / House / Senate, Trump to win the popular vote, Trump to win about 312, McCormick to win the Senate.
Those profitable bets were helped by data from Rich Baris at Big Data Poll, host of Inside the Numbers, and Robert Barnes, professional political and sports better. The info they provided were far more accurate and dispassionate than Nate’s. Eg. They didn’t give hopium that Trump would win states like VA, NH, etc.
Contrast that to Nate’s insistence that FL could NEVER go +8 for Trump, in his infamous scuffle with Keith Rabois. Nate is lucky Keith didn’t take him up on his $100,000 wager. Because not only did Trump win by 8, he won by a staggering 13.2%, flipping Miami-Dade solid red, exceeding the 10-12 that Keith predicted.
Yet there’s no acknowledgement of being wrong from Nate, on this or other aspects.
To end my much-too-long diatribe, I’m leaving some suggestions that could help improve the Bulletin:
-Take a long, hard look at how you weight polls. I kept saying, and no one had a good retort, that it was disastrous to give a poll like Quinnipiac an overweight of 1.36. Quinnipiac missed 2020 by an average of 7, and 100% in favor of Dems. They should have been disqualified from that alone, but instead Nate actually values them higher. This cycle, Quinnipiac was right only 40% of the time, worse than a coin flip.
Same goes for polls like Washington Post, which was right only 33% of the time.
Conversely, the right wing polls were right:
Atlas Intel 100%
Big Data Poll 90%
PollFair 86%
Rasmussen 86%
Quantus Insights 86%
Trafalgar 71%
Insider Advantage 71%
Left wing pundits like Litchmann, Sabato, etc were also disastrously wrong.
-I hate the 13 keys as well, but there’s something to the meta-themes that polls can’t capture. Again, I know Nate tries to incorporate some of this, but perhaps look to reduce the importance of polls and increase the importance of other factors.
-Dissect where his left wing lens may have blinded him to what was right in front of his eyes. None of us are non-partisan, but being too partisan can make us see anything we want in the data.
For those commenters who ridiculed me, called me nasty names, etc., I don’t really hold any animus. But I do hope this gave you a dose of humility, to learn that sometimes when you’re in a bubble, you can’t see that you’re in a bubble.
Despite cancelling my paid sub, I’ll still follow Nate, and I do wish him well. There’s absolutely a place for a newsletter like his that can add value to the public discourse.
Dude, the polls will likely have been off by about 2 1/2 points, which is less than the typical disparity going back to the 1960s. In other words, they were pretty accurate by historical standards. And if you don’t consult poll data, you’re relying on vibes.
EDIT: And meant to add, I thought avoiding a reliance on vibes was pretty much the whole point of subscribing to Nate's blog!
I'm not saying you're wrong broadly speaking, but the polls were off by considerably more than that in some very notable instances (e.g., Iowa (courtesy of the gold standard of polling, I'm told), or the other handful of states that were outside of the confidence interval in the model). There's also the fact that polls have underestimated Trump's performance three elections in a row, to the point that most seemed to take it as a given that the polls would skew leftward (see betting markets). I'm not saying any of that is definitive, and I generally defer to Nate's more reasoned insights. But I take the comment to be arguing for some weighting of non-polling factors and accounting for bias. Nate already does this to some degree, and I don't think that the commenter's criticisms are too ridiculous.
>...the polls were off by considerably more than that in some very notable instances...<
There are always outliers. I bet some polls thought Hoover was going to win in 1932. I assumed nearly all Silver readers were far more interested in aggregates.
Anyway, the polling consensus seemed to have converged on Harris +1.2 or so on the eve of the election. A Trump PV victory of roughly two points (or a Harris victory of roughly four points) was consistent with history, based on what the polls were telling us. I'm not going to claim I knew *in which direction* the polls were going to err: I thought it was a coin toss, as each campaign had elements they could point to as good signs.
I'm not looking to argue with you about whether or not the aggregates were good or bad this year. That doesn't seem useful or interesting. And as I said, I wasn't even disputing your general point. I was making a defense of the commenter's critiques, which seemed reasonable. But I always think it's helpful to do that, even if it doesn't immediately seem like there's much there.
>That doesn't seem useful or interesting.<
It may not be useful to you, but it's useful to me in responding to the commenter's critique, which seems to accusing Nate of being badly off, because (I quote) "All the signs were there for a massive Trump win."
This seems deeply mistaken, because all the signs weren't like that at all. (And that's even assuming what we saw was a "massive" Trump win, which itself seems highly questionable: Trump's going to have one of the smallest PV margins ever for a second term winner, and he looks like he will have *lost* House seats!)
Anyway, my point is: contra the OP, the polling we had made this a challenging race to call.
I think this is the third presidential election in a row where RCP's simple average of polls did better than Silver's weighted model.
It was massive by most metrics. First PV win by a GOP since 2004. He won all the swing states, increased his margins in FL and TX, and cut the D lead in blue states. Kamala did not do better than Biden in a single county. That's astounding.
OK thx
Since the beginning of the Trump era (2016), the polls have been wrong for the presidential election years, but fairly accurate for the midterm elections (2018 and 2022). This might be because low-propensity voters (who are hard to reach in polls) are excited by Trump but not excited enough to vote in the midterm elections without Trump on the ballot. Or maybe because of recent events in the midterm years (white supremacist rallies in 2017-18, Donna in 2022) that got the Democratic base energized and excited to vote.
The more education a voter has the more likely they are to vote. As the two parties trade bases that means that Republicans--who used to win the college educated vote--now do better in general elections while the Democrats do better in midterms and special elections. That's the exact opposite of the status quo from a decade ago.
I agree, directionally. Playing devil's advocate though, it seems not super neat and obvious as a blanket statement. For example, many have explained last week's result as, at least in part, a problem of democratic voters not showing up (e.g., "Trump got X more votes, sure, but Kamala got Y less votes, and that's the REAL story"). There may be something to that, but it would be inconsistent with a world in which dems are now the party of high-turnout voters. Who knows lol
One hypothesis: hardcore D partisans turned out. Less devoted Democrats were discouraged by the economy, illegal immigration and crime and stayed home.
Agreed. The polls were quite accurate, well within their margin of error. Can't expect much more. Sure, Ann Selzer's polls was widely off at the end. However, in reflection, the pollsters can have a drink and celebrate. They did a better job than I was expecting.
A simple yardstick would be to look at party ID which swung from D+4 to R+3. That alone could have been a far more reliable indicator that Trump was the heavy, heavy favorite. Biden needed +4 PV win to barely eke out the EC. If I just looked at this, and ignored all the poll, I likely would have been far more accurate in deciding Trump should be a 2-1 or 3-1 favorite. Sometimes too much data is too much data.
I said GIGO before the election. You can normalize and manipulate the data all you wish, but garbage in, garbage out. Polling is broken due to low response rates from most of the electorate (and subsequent over-response of college educated Democrats) and the unwillingness of cheap public polls to take measures to combat this. There was a time when poll aggregation solved the problem, but that ended after 2008, in my opinion. The RCP average had Harris winning the popular vote, mostly because of a bunch of polls that misread the electorate. The individual states got closer, but point at each state and you'll find a few pollsters that produced wildly out of whack results time and time again that influenced the averages. Those CNN polls that dropped the last week showing +5 and +6 leads in the Rust Belt for Harris...400 LV. Crazy. Nate's averages were even more biased to Harris than the RCP ones, mainly because of his weightings.
Some better analysis than this model's inputs is required to come up with a reliable picture.
Look dude, you seem to be genuinely trying have a discussion in good faith, so I will try and do the same. The internet was just chock full of a 100,000 takes just like this for why “Trump is the clear favorite” and “Harris in a landslide” and you know what? Many of them were hot garbage from both sides, echo chamber bullshit, but there were quite a few well done, clearly articulated, and well reasoned arguments why both candidates should win. And now your guy won and you can crow about it if you want but it doesn’t make your take any more special. Hindsight is 20/20 and no one really knew a damn thing for sure until Election Day came. I came to the sliver blog not because he’s Nostradamus, but because it was a refuse from the false certainty arrogance that is ubiquitous in nearly every other area of the internet. It’s tiring. 8 billion people in the world and they are so god damn cocky. I just wanted one place where there was an acknowledgement of the uncertainty.
Also, America’s peculiar form of democracy has absolutely skewed our perceptions. 2% in the tipping point state is simply a close a fkn election, it just happens to be enough for a huge electoral victory and a clean sweep of congress. Yes, on many fronts the democrats got their ass handed to them, which is a combination of a global backlash and the Democratic having their head thoroughly stuck up their own ass. But at the end of the day, the model predicted nearly even split in the tipping point state (which it correctly predicted to be PA) and it was off by 2%, which was well within 1 standard deviation of the mean.
I get it, there are big time republican blowout vibes right now, and there is good reason. In nearly every region and every demographic voters made their displeasure with the Democratic Party known. I’m not here to repudiate the fact that this was an absolute romp. The democratic brand is dog 💩 right now and they need to do a complete top to bottom house cleaning. It’s just that, the margin of the tipping point state was 2%, so from an electoral college perspective, it was very close and the model properly prepared us for this.
I think the early vote guys had a pretty good indication that Trump was ahead.
> All the signs were there for a massive Trump win.
I'm not sure what you are talking about, but in any case, does that mean you realize you were wrong now, because there was no "massive Trump win"? This was a 2 point squeaker, that could just as easily have gone the other way.
Look at relative shifts by precinct. Trump overperformed virtually everywhere. The polls didn't capture that.
“Trump over performed virtually everywhere. The polls didn’t capture that.”
When you say “overperformed” what I think you mean is “had better numbers than in 2020.” And the polls absolutely captured that. Biden won the PV by 4.5 points in 2020. Most national polls showed essentially a tied race this go around. So that means the polls captured a 4.5 point shift to Trump.
You want to get all up in your feelings because Trump is going to win the popular vote by about 1 point? OK, so the polls captured a 4.5 point swing instead of a 5.5 point swing. But don’t sit here and tell me the polls predicted something else.
How many polls predicted that Trump would win the popular vote?
So far as Trump's margin he's currently up by two points in the popular vote, and in the electoral count he's at 312.
I looked at the 17 most recent national polls included in the RCP average. While I think you and I can both agree in polling there isn't a statistically significant difference (with a standard MOE of 3, those numbers mean very little) between Harris +1, tied, and Trump +1, for the sake of playing your game let's say there is.
-5 polls showed Trump winning the popular vote
-5 polls showed the race tied
-7 polls showed Harris winning the popular vote
So 10/17 polls showed either Trump winning or the race tied, when the final PV margin is going to be Trump +1. That's quite good! Don't sit here and get butt hurt and cry because the data isn't supporting the conclusion you want to have.
The RCP average still had Harris up from what I recall, and here Silver had Harris heavily favored to win the popular vote. Trump beat his polling for the third consecutive election.
Again, currently Trump is ahead in the popular vote by about two points, not one. Additionally look at the number of counties where he did better compared to 2020 versus the counties where Harris improved on Biden.
Squeaker really? Trump won popular vote which not even Nate was predicting. NY was won by democrats by less than Trump.win TX and FL. NJ was <4. Complete sweep of swing states. This was a mandate and such a polarized environment This was a landslide. I think mid terms will be interesting. What if republicans keep.hold of the house in 2026?
That Trump won the popular vote was definitely somewhere in the tail of the distribution (as opposed to the center). But exceeding expectations doesn't make something a landslide lol, it makes it an 'upset'.
When all is said and done, Trump is going to have won the popular vote by about 2 points.
By contrast, Biden won it by 4.5 points, Obama by 4 points in 2012, and 7 points in 2008. Clinton won by 5.5 and 8.5, HW by 7, and Reagan won the popular vote by 10 points in 1980, and 18 points (!!) in '84.
If we compare these results to the past 50 years of elections, it definitely looks like a squeaker, albeit an unexpected one. It only looks like a 'landslide' if we compare to exactly Bush Jr. or Trump's first campaign – neither of which are particularly high bars.
Nate had something like a 23% chance Trump would win the PV. That’s definitely not in the tail.
Fair enough
My thoughts exactly
2% is not a landslide, and all winning politicians claim to have a mandate.
It is impressive to cite a loss in a blue state as evidence of a landslide victory though.
Look at the margins in NJ and VA.
Look at the Tories.
Look at the actual vote share for the Liberals in the UK. Only possible in a parliamentary system.
CJ never knows when to take the L.
I've never seen someone on the W side whine as much as you.
I suppose you do it because you are still confused.
Yup - 1.6% in the Blue Wall flips the result.
Trump was like half a percentage point popular vote worth of votes away from turning NJ, VA, NH, and MN, Maine, and NM red and creating a blood bath map 360 EVs
Kamala got cooked lol
What?
Are you cherry picking a percentage of the popular vote and putting it in specific states, and pretending that means something?
The 1.6% I mentioned was the 255k votes in those states divided by the total vote in those states.
Sorry if I wasn't clear.
It does mean something because there was a greater than expected shift in many of the blue states than the overall trend
No.
That doesn't mean anything because you don't get to magically move those people to other states.
In 2020 Trump lost by about 44k votes in three states. He has definitely outperformed that in this more recent election.
Did someone suggest otherwise?
What are you talking about? He lost all those states by at least 5 points. Harris would have swept the swing states with a 3% shift.
They're inventing some world where the vote counts in all states other than the 6 they mentioned stay the same, and then adding up the margins in those 6 states to get some total that I suppose comes to 0.5% of the *national* electorate.
TL;DR: It's really bad math, and using that same logic we could say that Kamala wins the election with just 0.2% more of the popular vote – so long as that 0.2% was entirely in the blue wall (mostly PA)
Yeah but is Kamala the one who had a 7 point national swing?
I can't believe none of you are seeing the electoral vulnerability in those states in the future lol. I guess the idea is too scary to process right now. Fair enough.
My point here is to show that for every person who copes by saying Kamala was a hair away in the rust belt, don't forget trump ended up close in a whole bunch of not very swingy states, swinging many of them by double digit margins
Compared to Joe's victory in 2020, this was def. a landslide.
"Compared to this one rock falling over, these two rocks falling over was def a landslide!"
Also Trump just won the PV by less than half as much as Biden, maybe a third as much, and got 6 more electoral votes. Just... what are you talking about?
Maybe you should be more than a little alarmed at New Jersey nearly becoming a swing state this cycle instead of clinging onto the idea that this election wasn’t a foreboding sign for democrats. Trump got thrashed in the public sphere for years and still managed to decisively beat Kamala; that should say a lot.
2024 was almost an exact mirror image of 2020.
Neither election was a mandate election. Both elections repudiated the performance of the incumbent president. Both elections had historically narrow popular vote margins. Both elections had surprisingly strong performances in states that were historically out of reach. Both elections narrowly shifted control of the Senate toward the winning presidential party but lost ground in the House. Both elections ended with about 310 electoral votes (the difference mostly because of the changed number of electoral votes in battleground states after the 2020 census), and all seven 2024 battleground states were won by the winning candidate in both elections.
These two elections were almost perfect mirror images of each other, and either you must conclude that both were consequentially large victories by one party or the other, or you must conclude that both are narrow victories magnified by an electoral system that exaggerates the swings in political influence from small changes in election results. Any other interpretation is evidence of partisan wishfulfillment analysis.
For the record, I have consistently maintained that Biden did not win any form of governing mandate in 2020. The message voters sent in 2020 was only that they were not ready for another four years of Trump after suffering through the first 10 months of COVID-19 and the civil unrest following the murder of George Floyd.
President Biden massively misread the 2020 results and foolishly allowed the progressive wing of his party to pursue an extremely ambitious legislative agenda as if he had received a true electoral rout and mandate. Your comments and what we are already seeing in the first week after the election suggest that President-elect Trump is about to make the same mistaken interpretation of his election results and also overplay his political hand.
This will result in an ever-so-predictable backlash in the 2026 midterms, with the most favorable Senate map of the three Senate cycles and a House with only a very narrow Republican margin. This is a clear recipe for swinging both houses of Congress, much like the 2006 midterm cycle.
The big question is whether the Democratic Party can find a fresh new face with a fresh new vision for the party, like Obama provided in 2008. My two best outsider candidates to fulfill this role of a fresh new voice for the party are Mark Cuban and Jamie Dimon, both highly respected, politically savvy, high-profile public figures with no allegiance or baggage from legacy Democratic politics and the freedom to redefine the image of the party. Both are extremely successful businessmen with strong centrist credentials and the independence to craft a new vision for the party much as Bill Clinton did in 1992 and Obama did in 2008.
"Neither election was a mandate election."
A mandate for what though? In Biden's case it was clearly a mandate for a return to the old status quo. The critical point is that there was a mismatch between what the public wanted and what the Biden admin wanted.
That's why this question is meaningless. Are the results a mandate for mass deportations? I would argue that the answer is yes, absolutely. A mandate for more troops in Syria? No, the exact opposite.
To call this a "squeaker" is a bit much. By today's standards, this was a solid win. Not a blowout, but decisive.
With so much of the electorate permanently committed to one of the two parties, you're never going to see things like Reagan '84. Obama '08 is about as big as it gets.
Like the man said, democracy is the proposition that the people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
Hi Evan,
It's often used but I think it's harmful to use "today's standards" to characterize what are historically very close races as a "solid win" or (as if often done but not what you did here, a "landslide"). We are in an era of nearly 50/50 split of the voting public of the two parties. If a <= 3% shift in the votes would have changed the outcome, then it was a squeaker.
I didn't pick the number 3% out of thin air. In 1980 pollster Pat Caddell was asked why he said the election was a flat footed tie and Reagan won by 3%. He explained: The Carter polls showed Carter down by 3%. But it had a margin of error of 3%. So they assumed they were tied when, with hindsight, they were probably down by 6%. And, back then when people really decide at the last moment and we didn't expect pollsters to exactly predict that, bad news the weekend before the election moved the voters another 3%. Resulting in what Reagan would call "a mandate" with only a 9% margin of victory.
Like in 2020, this was a very close election with a clear winner. But the fundamentals of the voting public of the two parties being split around the 50%/50% has not changed. Could it be the start of a trend: Trump lost by 4.5% four years ago and won by 1% this time... maybe. But given the seasaw nature of the last several elections, probably not.
It was massive by most metrics. First PV win by a GOP since 2004. He won all the swing states, increased his margins in FL and TX, and cut the D lead in blue states. Kamala did not do better than Biden in a single county. That's astounding.
2024 was almost an exact mirror image of 2020. Neither election was a mandate election. Both elections repudiated the performance of the incumbent president. Both elections had historically narrow popular vote margins. Both elections had surprisingly strong performances in states that were historically out of reach. Both elections narrowly shifted control of the Senate toward the winning presidential party but lost ground in the House. Both elections ended with about 310 electoral votes (the difference mostly because of the changed number of electoral votes in battleground states after the 2020 census), and all seven 2024 battleground states were won by the winning candidate in both elections.
These two elections were almost perfect mirror images of each other, and either you must conclude that both were consequentially large victories by one party or the other, or you must conclude that both are narrow victories magnified by an electoral system that exaggerates the swings in political influence from small changes in election results. Any other interpretation is evidence of partisan wishfulfillment analysis.
For the record, I have consistently maintained that Biden did not win any form of governing mandate in 2020. The message voters sent in 2020 was only that they were not ready for another four years of Trump after suffering through the first 10 months of COVID-19 and the civil unrest following the murder of George Floyd.
President Biden massively misread the 2020 results and foolishly allowed the progressive wing of his party to pursue an extremely ambitious legislative agenda as if he had received a true electoral rout and mandate. Your comments and what we are already seeing in the first week after the election suggest that President-elect Trump is about to make the exact same mistaken interpretation of his election results and also overplay his political hand.
This will result in an ever-so-predictable backlash in the 2026 midterms, with the most favorable Senate map of the three Senate cycles and a House with only a very narrow Republican margin. This is a clear recipe for swinging both houses of Congress, much like the 2006 midterm cycle.
The big question is whether the Democratic Party can find a fresh new face with a fresh new vision for the party, like Obama provided in 2008. My two best candidates to fulfill this role are Mark Cuban or Jamie Dimon, both highly respected, politically savvy, high-profile public figures with no allegiance or baggage from legacy Democratic politics and the freedom to redefine the image of the party. Both are extremely successful businessmen with strong centrist credentials.
Even if Trump were overwhelmingly popular odds are that the Dems would take the House in 2026. That's just the normal pattern for the first midterm after a presidential election--see Clinton, Obama, Trump and Biden.
One more point.
In the past, a party flipping the WH by winning both the electoral and popular votes also has long coattails and pick up lots of House seats. And then the midterms are a regression to the mean.
But so far this decade that is not happening. The GOP picked up 5 seats in 2020. And then another 5 in 2022. And this time they will be right around net zero. We're around a stability point. So I think there would have to be an unusually strong pro or anti GOP wave for 2026 to see much of a swich either way. Which means the Democrats chances of flipping the House in 2026 is probably less than, or no better than, 50/50. (Maybe 50/50 since the party out of power may be more likely to show up at midterms. But there just not as many swing districts as in prior decades.)
It depends. We'll see what happens then. I think economic performance will be more meaningful than anything else. Or if we are in a war or something.
The only exception was Bush after 9/11. Americans just like divided government.
This is the best take I’ve seen anywhere on the internet about the last two elections. (and I don’t just say that because you’re predicting a Dem win in 2026!). Thanks for sharing.
Didn’t Harris do better than Biden in the counties around Atlanta, in western North Carolina, on the northwest tip of Michigan’s lower peninsula, and several other regions?
This was a 2004 style election. A clear win, but nothing like “massive”. There hasn’t been a “massive” win since 1984. This is smaller than Obama’s 2008 win, which was the only large win in decades.
I think she did better in Dane in Wisconsin.
I was looking for instances of that, and that was one I saw.
R+6 national popular vote shift from the prior election is indeed a blowout given a Republican has won the popular vote exactly once since 1988.
Even Bush 2004 despite a better pop vote margin was much closer; Kerry was 2% away from winning the EC in Ohio.
This is the most decisive Republican victory in decades. MAGA platform with a less divisive leader is capable of a 400 EV rout in 2028.
For reference Nikki Haley was beating Biden by 15 in the national popular vote during the primary season.
So a football team that wins by 1 points has a blowout victory if they lost the previous game by enough.
Pretty funny.
Right now it's two points and Trump above 50%. And in terms of the electoral count Trump got to 312.
And it still isn't a popular vote blowout.
It's big enough to impress guys like Harry Enten. And it's big enough to kick off a civil war in the Democratic party.
The prior election is mostly irrelevant here. I say "mostly" because you do have to account for factors like polarization; victory margins on both sides are much smaller today than they used to be.
But you don't get bonus points for improving on your previous showing. And you certainly shouldn't assume those same trends will continue. Trump was the face of the pandemic in 2020. Biden and Harris were the face of inflation in 2024. The Republican nominee in '28 will be the face of whatever is top of mind that year -- good or bad.
You do if your party has had one popular mandate in 3 decades
If you or the party don't think that's an alarming sign then this will be more like 1980 than 2004
Maaaaybe. Elections are about more than one thing--the Trump team is convinced that their best ad was the one attacking Harris for supporting sex change operations for illegal immigrants in federal custody. I would not be surprised if the Dems are out of the executive until they pull a Sista Souljah and put some distance between themselves and trans activists: "No boys in girls' sports".
I disagree with your second half. No chance the low prop voters turn out for a RINO like Nikki. In fact, I'm doubtful the low prop voters will turn out for anyone besides Trump. That's a worry the GOP will need to address sooner rather than alter.
Woot! Something we agree on mostly.
I wouldn't call Haley a RINO - she is a proud graduate of a segregation academy, and is definitely MAGA adjacent. If Haley and people like her leave the Rs the GOP will be in a world of hurt.
The 2028 Republican primary will be interesting.
Haley, DeSantis, Vance, Kemp?, a couple senators and/or Cabinet folks (Cruz/Rubio/Noem/etc), Lombardo?, Huckabee Sanders?
And of course Tucker Carlson.
If you don’t like Silver Bulletin being poll-based, then just leave.
That is accurate. But Nate need to lower the ratings for left wing polls of morning consult, Washington post, quinipiac the same way he does for right wing polls of trafalgar, Rasmussen. He was actually saved a little by right wing pollsters.
His model adds weight to pollsters who are more accurate already, and he compensates for house effects.
Of course Rasmussen and Trafalgar were further off in 2022, so that balances things a little.
This is the third presidential election in a row where just averaging polls (RCP) performs better than Silver's weighted model.
It's like how stock market ETFs perform better than 75% of actively managed funds.
You don't seem to understand that RCP is an actively managed polling average.
But they were more right in 2020. Quinipiac, Washington post and morning consult were more wrong in 2020 and now in 2024. So.shouldnt they be weighted down going forward as well?
They were, are, and will be in the future assuming Nate uses the same basic model.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/pollster-ratings-silver-bulletin
He gave WaPo an A+ and Quinnipiac an A-. Both polls were trash in 2020 and 2024. That alone makes me question Nate's capabilities. If I didn't tell you the names of the polls but just showed you how much they were off by, and how often they favored Dems, you'd say toss them out.
He didn't do that. As I said, he gave overweights to Quinnipiac and WaPo, two of the worst pollsters by far.
You don't even know how to read his table, do you?
Add up the influence values for Atlas.
What difference does it make? RCP just averaging all the polls did better.
Do you have any justification for why he added 1 point to the popular vote estimate his own model spit out in order to "sync them up" with her performance in the battleground states?
It was an entirely unscientific endeavor, taking a stab that national polls were on the aggregate underestimating Kamala because of disproportionately better battleground polling when the simpler answer could have been that the Pop vote EC bias disappeared (a point he conceded in follow up)
None of this is entirely mathematical, scientific or objective. To some degree his own model does not rely only on polling. He himself states there's some fundamentals integrated into it
The simple average of polls at RCP has performed better than Silver's weighted model for three presidential elections in a row I believe. They're poll based too--that's not the issue.
Was it poll based when he sneakily adjusted pop vote
Margin to +2 based off strong battleground polling relative to weaker national polling?
When his own model showed +0.9?
I like data driven approaches as much as the next guy but don’t pretend his bias didn’t get in the way
Like I said, I am. Guess you didn't read?
I can read your comments (better than you can, apparently). You said lots of people would tell you to just leave. I didn’t want you to be wrong about that as you are about so much else. You’re welcome.
I was right a lot more than I was wrong, which again you'd have known if you read the post.
This was a clear trump win, but you guys need to stop convincing yourself it was some "massive" win. Reps are acting the same right now as Dems did in 2020 and I don't think it will end well for them.
It was massive by most metrics. First PV win by a GOP since 2004. He won all the swing states, increased his margins in FL and TX, and cut the D lead in blue states. Kamala did not do better than Biden in a single county. That's astounding. But you're right, 2026 could easily flip the House back to D.
Massive if you grade on a curve.
Most of your previous comments on this website have been antagonistic and rude towards other subscribers.
Not sure why you're writing this long manifesto to convince others that you are not. Just weird.
Guess JD Vance and me are just weird.
Certainly true for JD Vance :)
That's President Vance to you after January 2029 :)
Polling averages were off by what, 2%? Silver kept pointing out that such a shift either way would take all seven swing states with it.
That's such an obvious statement, and offers no value.
So how was he way off when a tiny shift either way would determine the election? Margin of error is a very real thing in polling and polling averages.
You clearly don't understand the point of Nate's model.
Not a surprise really.
If it was so obvious, why did no one in 2016 offer it except Nate?
Yall don’t understand Monte Carlo simulations, but convince yourself that you do.
Simulations are only as good as their assumptions and inputs. Garbage in, garbage out.
TLDR, but did you explain somewhere in there how polls or the model were supposed to be "wrong" while getting the outcome right in the fat part of the distribution/calling the most likely state map?
Right for the wrong reasons is interesting, but it is wrong. A false premise implies any conclusion. Perhaps they don't cover that in Poli-"sci".
Still can't admit you were wrong eh? lol
About what?
Predictions are hard, especially about the future.
Looks like RCP did a better job.
RCP and Nate were at the same place, right?
RCP had Trump leading in all the swing states.
This statement is how you recognize a person who fundamentally does not understand polling or statistics.
LOL.
Ok genius, how are Silver's weighted poll results closer to the actual final tallies than the simple average from RCP?
Not that hard when the signs are staring you in the face.
And I'm sure your signs are as accurate as an octopus predicting World Cup wins.
Anybody with an ounce of common sense should be able to look at new voters registrations in PA for September and October and and view those as suggestive.
This
While you make several cogent and useful observations and points, your description of a large polling error and the conclusion that poll data should be deemphasized in favor of other data sources is poorly supported.
The states with the most robust polling data had the most accurate vote result projections from the Silver Bulletin model. This is most clearly demonstrated by comparing the model's vote projecting for the seven battleground states, which were by far the most heavily polled states, with how accurate the model's vote projecting was in the other 43 states. The actual results in those seven states were all between a 1% and 3% delta from the projected final vote margin. By comparison, the states with much less polling data averaged about a 6% delta from the Silver Bulletin forecast margin.
If the Silver Bulletin model were overdependent on poll data, one would expect the exact opposite pattern.
I appreciate and value your extremely well-considered and written post-mortem analysis of the election. The comment section will be all the poorer with your absence.
Appreciate your kind words. One of my major issues is how Nate weighs certain pollsters. Both Quinnipiac and Washington Post were horribly off in 2020, yet he rates them A+ and A- respectively. Both polled in error favoring Dems 100% of the time. Polls that bad should be tossed out, not given overweighting. They were horribly off again. Until Nate becomes less partisan and acknowledges that the "right wing" pollsters were far more accurate, his model will always be left leaning.
"All the signs were there for a massive Trump win." -- debatable. Here is a conversation I had on the afternoon of November 5.
D: I agree with some of the things he (Nate Silver) said are weird about the polls. Like a lot that have results inconsistent with crosstabs and a statistically abnormal number making it tied or a 1-point race.
A: Yeah...
D: Like Trump getting 20% of the Black vote and 40% of the Hispanic vote seems really out of line with a tie, unless there's really a massive counter realignment among suburban voters... And then, what are the chances that two big vote swings like that would be the same size...
A: In 9th grade... (story about flipping coins and faking data)
D: I wouldn't be shocked to see either candidate win by like 4 points. I think it's really hard to predict and poll and pollsters are just copping out a bit, then it becomes GIGO to Nate's model.
The point of this story? There were certainly some signs for a solid Trump win. There are other signs that Harris would win. I don't think Trump winning by 1.5 is that earth-shattering compared to my expectations a week ago (that were guided by Nate among others), I was actually far more shocked in 2020 because I thought he was going to lose by 7-8 points and actually believed the pollsters had adequately corrected then for 2016.
I think we all want to hear A's 9th grade story now!
You were supposed to flip a coin 100 times and then record how many times it came up heads/tails, and most of the groups in the class came up with exactly 50 of each. A said that 9th graders didn't know how to fake their data in believable way.
If the best one can do is say "it's 50/50", I'd argue there's no value there at all. There was never a chance that Harris would win by 4. That's my entire point.
I have a six sided die and a coin with a 1 on one face and 2 on the other face.
For one of these objects, the probability of getting an outcome of 1 is 50/50. For the other, it very much isn't 50/50.
If you can't understand this, you should definitely stay well away from any kind of gambling. You'd stand to lose an awful lot of money.
I'm actually a consistent winner in low limit poker, and I made out quite profitably from betting this election. Doubt I need advice from you, but thanks.
Ah yes, gamblers famously win their money based on rigorous analysis and their opinions therefore carry great weight
No less weight than bloggers with their black boxes.
The model said 50/50. The question is whether the model was actually reflective of reality. Given the results of the election I think you can make a pretty strong case that the answer is no.
So the model would only have been right in your opinion if there had been a tie?
Wow.
No. I think this was a demographics election, meaning we are seeing a fundamental reshaping of the political landscape. That probably started years ago and we are just now seeing the wave breaking. But the polling didn't really pick it up and Silver's model didn't either.
Tell us you don't understand probability without saying that.
The model said it was a 50/50 coin toss. Was that actually reflective of reality? I have my doubts.
You see, we will not get any more samples from this very distribution. So what's the point?
I suspect that what won the election for Trump was demographic shifts, and demographic change is like a glacier. Very slow but massive.
The shift for Hispanic men started years ago. The polling didn't pick it up because polling is not a good instrument for detecting that kind of change. In other words we're seeing the limits of polling, and as a consequence the limits of modeling based on polling.
Well said. I want this comment copy/pasted a billion times.
Prediction markets were far more accurate with a 2-1 probability that Trump would win versus Nate's 1-1.
Nate had the popular vote at D+1, and also said that if the popular vote was "between D+1 and D+2" that Trump had a 66.9% chance of winning the election.
By winning the electoral college, not the popular vote.
We now know there was never a chance that the election would be tied, or that Trump would win by 3, or that Harris would win by 5. You can either say the prediction was total BS, or you can ask yourself if someone making a 50/50 prediction is right, roughly 50% of the time or if they are consistently way off.
Huh? Of course there was a chance for those outcomes.
I guess that's more of a philosophical question about determinism. My view is, there is one outcome that is actually going to happen, and models use incomplete data to make a best guess as to the likelihood of different outcomes, since we lack omniscience.
Is it really determinism or is it just that polling wasn't a very good tool for actually measuring what was happening in the country?
There was never a chance for Harris to win by 5.
Again with a rampant demonstration that you don't understand probability.
You make some good points for sure about bubbles, but I think Nate is better than most in overcoming this bias
Yup. Garbage in, garbage out.
Totally agree with a you said. The comments from some of the Harris supporters on this site suggest they are on a cult.
Holy moly, take it to a publisher, man.
In all seriousness, you seem like an intelligent person, certainly, but I think you’re being a bit too confident about what are essentially just vibes.
Not vibes, trends. Party ID which has almost perfect correlation to election results. Right track/wrong track, again with almost perfect correlation. Republican registration trends in key swing states. Nate is like the blind man feeling the trunk of the elephant, while ignoring the other parts.
Ok then make your own blog dude.
You'll be missed. I mean that unironically.
Question for Nate: If Trump does not in fact declare himself God-Emperor for life, will you do a public mea culpa for all your alarmism about “our sacred democracy!” over the years?
Question for you: do you think that Trump will pardon the people who stormed the capitol? Do you think Trump will stop lying about electoral fraud?
Do you think idiots like yourself will ever stop strawmanning serious criticism? Or will you rationalize each step away from the principles on which the country was founded?
Only idiots like you keep crying wolf about the authoritarianism that never came, while people in actual brutal regimes are suppressed on a regular basis
Jan 2028 will come and nothing will happen. You can blame your “democracy is dying” message for your
absolutely humiliating loss.
The convictions for the Jan 6th rioters were disproportionate to the penalties (or lack thereof) handed out to previous rioters, such as the Pussy Protest rioters who also trespassed in the Capitol. So yes, justice demands that those rioters now be pardoned.
Assuming he doesn't issue blanket pardons for all the Jan 6th insurrectionists, and reasonably follows the rule of law for 4 years?
Democracy isn't only at risk because of Trump. The full MAGA team is uninterested in voting participation and democratic process.
Trump is already on thin ice by requesting that the Senate recess to allow him to appoint "obsequious instruments of his pleasure".
It wasn't an insurrection.
It most certainly was "a violent uprising against an authority or government".
Of course people brainwashed by the Fox News echo chamber don't agree, but that isn't reality.
Disagree with your characterization, but people brainwashed by the MSNBC echo chamber will be unable to grasp the nuance. Nobody was armed. The only person killed was the protestor who was shot point-blank by a Capitol cop for no reason. It was a riot, it was vandalism, but it was not an "insurrection."
Riot : "a violent disturbance of the peace by a crowd."
Insurrection : ""a violent uprising against an authority or government".
So yes, a riot against authority or the government is exactly what an insurrection is.
Beyond that, yes, people were armed.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/jul/13/donald-trump/jan-6-defendants-were-armed-guns-other-weapons-doc/
Trying to climb in through a transom as part of an attacking mob is in fact a reason to expect deadly force might be used.
There was no serious organized attempt to seize control of the Capitol. Are there guards in the Capitol? Are those guards armed? If so that would imply that any "insurrectionists" would require firearms themselves.
Prior to J6 numerous BLM protests morphed into riots at night after the families went home. J6 is just a continuation of that same general pattern--another riot in a year of riots.
You can debate the semantics of calling it an insurrection but it's a joke to say "nobody was armed".
A tiny minority brought weapons. Did they deploy them in any fashion?
It was a demand to halt the legitimate proceedings of democracy via force
They didn't plan very well in that case. Since the Capitol is protected by armed guards the failure to bring in their own firearms would seem to be a fatal flaw.
I think pardons for at least some of the J6 prisoners is pretty much guaranteed. I am also skeptical that the bulk of the voting public cares about recess appointments.
Of course.
But I am not answering about the bulk of the voting public.
I am answering about the dangers to democracy.
Whether or not the majority of the public views something as a threat to democracy may be a good indicator as to whether or not it's actually a threat to democracy.
The definition of democracy is no more subject to democratic rule than the definition of monarchy is subject to monarchical rule.
Yes, language is descriptive and can change. But democracy is not a synonym for "good". People can and sometimes do choose to reject democracy.
Ironically, trying to prevent them from rejecting democracy would itself be inherently undemocratic. Some states even choose to do this; see the modern German state.
At this point the discussion has become so twisted on itself as to have zero connection with reality.
🤡
Trump has promised to "root out" the "vermin" in the free press who are "enemies of the people". He hasn't even been nominated yet and you are already calling him a liar. Tsk tsk.
Yes, and you can find an endless list of equivalent quotes from Democrats about their plans. Stop pretending you really believe that heated rhetoric should be taken literally when you know full well it's just talk. It makes you look foolish and alienates the people you need to convince.
Is it just talk? I think it is reasonable enough to consider that someone might do what they said they would do. I am personally going to wait and see. If he does in fact try and silence the press will you be on his side or on the side of liberty?
I think if he denaturalizes and deports legal Americans like those in Springfield that's already fascist but I guess you don't draw the line until he literally cancels elections. You think the government asking Facebook to take down a story while Trump controls it is worse than the owner of Twitter endorsing trump, making it a far right run platform, pushing his own tweets to all accounts, and paying people a million dollars to vote Republican.
“the owner of Twitter endorsing trump, making it a far right run platform”
This is ridiculous. Why will you never learn that these deranged accusations about the “far right” alienate people from your coalition every time you say it?
After pressure from the FBI, Facebook has taken down posts that share the Vance dossier. Do you support this government overreach?
Thankfully, I don't think anyone has proposed or discussed denaturalizing anyone of citizenship, which would be disgraceful.
when was nate ever one of these people?
Yeah like he's the kind of guy who takes a lot of crap from the left for not being alarmist enough and sane-washing the right (I believe, largely unfairly).
He is less extreme than some of the Democrats' utter lunatics, especially nowadays. But I remember listening to, I think it was the final Model Talk of the 2020 campaign, and rolling my eyes back into my skull at hearing Nate say that it might be the last ever election if Trump won. And even on this blog he has made many silly statements about “protecting democracy” and so on.
Elon Musk, the wealthiest and most powerful man in the world, recently said that people who disagree with him about specific political issues belong in jail. I am personally more with Voltaire, who famously said, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." Voltaire probably didn't say that, but he would have agreed.
Do you agree that political speech that offends Elon Musk should lead to jail time?
Whether Trump declares himself "God-Emperor" or not is irrelevant. He has given the uninformed portion of the American electorate permission to act out in public, rather than just at a bar. That is enough damage to democracy.
Nate, as a well meaning former blue dog democrat (before Reagan and achieving enlightenment), I have seen very little that indicates much of the democrat leadership has learned much of anything. Discounting completely the internal foodfight between Pelosi, Biden, and Harris, democrats continue to seem wedded to this racist, misogynist, trans America nonsense that is killing them. I hasten to add this is not just a messaging thing. This is a belief pattern that really is at odds with "normal" Americans. What the party ignores to its great peril is that most working and middle class Americans, regardless of "identity," do not view their country through the prism of grievance. What Trump did was offer them (including Hispanics economically fearful of uncontrolled emigration and culturally wary of wokism) the opportunity to embrace that without fear of condemnation. Look at those red totals in blue bastions. Rather than a blip on a timeline of the march of progressive presidential power, this feels to me much more like an inflection point such as 1968.
he won by a point in the most hostile environment for incumbent parties in like 50 years
Did not hear any of this last few months. What happened?
I’ve been quite consistent that the fundamentals of this election seemed quite anti incumbent. That other people with my political persuasion didn’t seem to agree is their own business.
See point 4 in
https://www.natesilver.net/p/24-reasons-that-trump-could-win
It has been well covered. Nate provides one link, and there have been other example elections following that Axios article.
Harris was a terrible candidate. Plus the Dems have drifted too far left. Wide open southern border was a disastrous idea.
There is a long trend line of white america hating, then coexisting, and finally accepting minorities.
Sure there are large pockets of racism, misogyny, and homophobia, but advocating these positions can end careers in most of the country.
Transphobia will go the same way eventually.
It is just the most recent wedge issue that the Republicans have stirred up to capture headlines and scare people who are so isolated that they haven't met a transgender person (or don't know that they have).
Eventually Republicans will run out of people to demonize, and will have to compete on actual policies.
There is not a "normal" parent in this country who wants their daughter competing physically in an athletic event or sharing a locker room with a man pretending he is a woman. Democrats can decide as they will, but that will never be winning argument with any parent with the remotest bit of common sense or protective love of their child. They will also find it impossible to find a majority of parents who believe cutting healthy body parts off minors without their permission is anything but abhorrent. If the democrats want those to be the hills they wish to die upon, then far be it from me to prevent it.
You know there used to be "White only" drinking fountains, right?
The idea that sex change surgery is being done without parental involvement is fiction designed to get people like you to turn off your brain.
The question is whether parents have the best interests of their children at heart (Munchausen syndrome by proxy) or whether they're fully informed in the first place.
Regardless, no transexual should be competing in a women's sports league.
Where do you draw the line on trusting parents? It is an interesting puzzle.
Aren't women's sports league rules are up to the leagues and players?
Biden changed Title IX to be based on “gender identity” rather biological sex.
It's not up to the players, which is why we're seeing significant amounts of conflict.
If somebody is intentionally harming their child in order to get hospital treatment do you suggest trusting them?
My problem on trans vs. an issue like gay marriage a few years ago where I was 100% pro, is that with a lot of trans issues there are actual victims to point to. Sorry if I thought it was a joke that that Algerian won a gold medal, or that the same thing is supposed to happen in miniature to women's sports universally. It didn't make me vote for Trump but I honestly don't get people who think that kind of thing is a good hill to die on.
Not to mention, I've seen way too many people under 18 change their mind about tattoos or even what clothes to wear in the morning, and personally known young people who have been all over the place on their gender identity. I'm not very comfortable with minors changing their physical identity, especially when it feels like a a lot of the research around this is very politically motivated (again there's an actual "victim" to point to here unlike with gay marriage, pot legalization, whatever).
I think trans issues will be more like school busing than gay marriage in 30 years. i.e. shoved into a memory hole until only people over 40 or 50 even remember the debate. Obviously I'm not talking about the actual physical safety of trans people or the rights of adults to do what they please with their lives -- those are issues I will always stand up for. But with some of the trans issues they not only have been wrong on the merits, but they have kind of tarred the Democrats with wacky ideas and helped facilitate Trump's comeback. Sorry if I feel that way.
First, the Algerian boxer wasn’t trans - she just had a masculine-looking face and people assumed she was trans. For reference, I’m a trans woman who has mixed feelings about trans women competing in women’s sports (studies have shown that trans women on estrogen have the same muscle mass as non-trans women, but they can still benefit from a larger bone structure in some sports). However, apart from wanting to exclude trans women, none of the conservative people I’ve talked to seem to genuinely care about women’s sports, and most don’t even watch women’s sports at all. If they care about supporting women, why aren’t conservative activists demanding that female professional athletes be paid equally to male professional athletes?
"why aren’t conservative activists demanding that female professional athletes be paid equally to male professional athletes?"
Possibly because they believe in market forces, and that female athlete pay will rise as ticket sales, merch sales, and viewer ratings rise? We are already seeing that with respect to Caitlin Clark in the WNBA.
After doing more research in the last 15 minutes than the rest of my life combined, I honestly have no clue. Are right-wingers flooding the zone on this for propaganda purposes, or are lefties being disingenuous by conflating the lack of proof that she is XY with a zero probability of her being XY? It seems like it would be very easy to release a test independent of the IBA to put this matter to rest.
The Algerian boxer is XY. The news came out the other day. She probably has 5-ARD, in which male babies have internal testes and are mistaken for girls. But they still produce testosterone and as adults have male strength. Check her photo at the Guardian.
She’s still denying it.
https://amp.theguardian.com/sport/2024/nov/06/olympic-boxer-imane-khelif-takes-legal-action-over-male-chromosomes-claims
The question I'm more interested in is how the right seems to apply the same logic to girls' and women's sports regardless of the organizing body or level of competition.
To me, there is a clear political question as to whether transgender girls should be permitted to compete against cisgender girls in sports that are funded by public tax dollars (e.g., junior high and high school athletic competitions, most collegiate athletics).
As a parent of a cisgender girl athlete I think the default should be that as many kids as possible should be permitted to compete in athletics at the junior high and high school levels. We want more kids playing sports -- not fewer. The evidence of domination by transgender girls just isn't there to suggest that they are somehow inhibiting the ability of cisgender girls from participating or competing.
Given that we're in a transition phase where we are really learning about the puts and takes, I think the thing to do is to try to find an answer that has the smallest potential for harm. So then you ask yourself, which is the bigger harm -- preventing a kid from participating at all or *potentially* requiring a kid to compete against an athlete who is taller, faster, or stronger? Seems like the answer is pretty obvious to me.
Quite aside from that, though, you see the same arguments being made w/r/t professional competitions (e.g., the example in these comments about the Olympian who many believed to be a trans woman). This makes no sense to me, as it would seem as though the position of the right would, by default, be that the organizing body should be free to act in its own self interest and would-be customers/viewers/fans are free to either consume the content or not. In short, I guess I'm saying that the fact that professional examples are continually brought up makes it clear that this is really more a manufactured culture war issue than it is a good faith policy argument that's being made.
Trans women could still participate, just against cis men. No one is saying trans women can't participate. It's just a question of which team is best.
No males in women’s sports. I’m a woman.
You do realize that the Algerian boxer was born female/not trans, right?
She’s XY. Report was leaked the other day.
Nope, this incident came up in three different conversations I was involved with and no one ever mentioned that. Not being a huge boxing fan I just assumed that if there were 10 people of all different political persuasions not challenging the premise that she was a trans man, it didn't come up on my radar as something to check for as potential misinformation.
This is part of the problem with all the hysteria about trans women in sports. It results in misinformation and hateful attacks against people like this Algerian boxer, whose sin is apparently that she is too strong and fit to compete in athletics. It wasn’t cast in a trans lens, but Serena Williams was similarly attacked early in her tennis career.
She's a biological male that was raised as a female due to a medical condition.
Okay, but now that I actually read about this more, there's good reason to suspect that even if she was not an XX woman, the IOC would not have detected that with their current procedures. I understand the IBA is not the most reliable source with their two tests, but I don't see any proof anywhere else that she isn't XY. She took a third test, independently, and didn't voluntarily release those results, and when they were leaking (going yet another layer down and assuming the leaker was honest), it seems like she was a male after all.
This is a recurring pattern I see where certain things become so politicized that it's virtually impossible for there to be a neutral party, but just using Bayesian priors, it seems unlikely that her team wouldn't release something to put this story to rest, if indeed those tests existed. It seems more likely that if they aren't releasing exculpatory evidence, it's because that evidence doesn't exist.
https://www.reddit.com/r/olympics/comments/1elmczd/what_are_the_facts_regarding_khelif_imane/
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/massive-outrage-over-imane-khelifes-leaked-medical-report-democrats-hate-women/amp_articleshow/114954830.cms
I agree that the "issue" helped Trump.
But demonizing people has helped Republicans for a long time.
Or maybe the Democrats are just so far outside the mainstream that they have descended into lunacy.
Tell me again about sharks and Arnold Palmer.
Those comments were hilarious and clever.
How many people go to a Trump rally?
How many people have to walk past a homeless encampment or have to deal with urban crime?
One brand of craziness has real world consequences.
Republicans have been about policy from day one. You might not like their policies, but they have had a consistent platform unlike the Dems which at the moment can't figure out what their own constituency is.
I think Democrats are more effective when they argue that Republicans *do* have policy. Many of their actual policies (for better or worse) aren't very popular. Or when they did, they said "Project 2025" a lot which is more of a dog-whistle to MSNBC viewers than something that an average voter will understand.
Calling out massive tax cuts to the rich, or that Republicans want to slash financial regulation and bring back the 2008 crisis, I think resonates a lot more with the average schmuck who doesn't follow a lot of politics (and these things are incidentally a part of Project 2025, but much more understandable I think than just saying "Project 2025").
What are you talking about?
When was the "day one" you refer to?
Is this the platform you are referring to? https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/2024-republican-party-platform
Okay, I was not specific enough. Sorry. "Day one" refers to the Abraham Lincoln administration.
In which case the 2020 and 2024 Republican platforms are the new and improved policy free versions.
Read a little bit :
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/people/other/republican-party-platforms
But of course pretending that today's Republican party is similar to Lincoln's makes you sound home schooled.
The two parties have traded bases. The GOP now represents the working class, as the Democrats discovered last week to their regret. It's understandable that the platforms have shifted.
People aren’t transphobic. They just strongly object to men in women’s sports.
Wrong - there is definitely actual hate directed at trans people who have nothing to do with sports, and more subtle discrimination.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/06/28/americans-complex-views-on-gender-identity-and-transgender-issues/
You may be confusing your opinion with other people's.
Maybe some people are but the big issue is males in women’s sports. It’s just not fair.
It statistically never happens.
The handful of cases are blown up to scare people who turn off their brains after certain words.
Anyone who voted for Trump based solely on this issue is clueless.
It happened with Lia Thomas.
I support trans rights and think she was selfish and what she did set back trans rights by decades.
Trying to pretend it isn't an issue is not going to work. Anyone who cares about trans rights and/or winning elections needs to say that trans women can't play on teams with cis women.
I think there is a simple solution - just RENAME the teams "Assigned Male at Birth - All Genders" and "Assigned Female at Birth - All Genders." This makes it explicit that all genders are welcome on any team, and the teams are just divided based on assigned sex at birth.
If it's not a big deal then why didn't Harris say that she agreed with Trump? She was getting killed over the issue.
I agree with what most but not the conclusion. Trump will overstep and lose support. He doesn't have anyone around him to tell him he is going too far.
It is humorous that you think the IBA was protecting her privacy. Somehow idiots like you and me found out about their decision/conclusion, which remains unsupported by any evidence. You presumably feel differently, but I am not interested living in a world where “authorities” like the IBA (or the government) would ban people and then say they can’t provide the evidence because they are protecting the banned person’s privacy. It is absurd on its face and obvious to anyone who thinks about it for two seconds. Which is why the IBA has been discredited.
Huh? How has it been discredited?
They're obviously not going to release her medical records. She can do that if she wants.
The IBA reputation has been deteriorating for a long time - allegations of corruption, financial mismanagement and weakness, integrity of officiating and scoring. Since the current leader (Kremlev) was elected in 2020, concerns have increased further, particularly over ties between the organization and the Russian government/Putin. In June 2023, the IBA was removed from the Olympic movement. It isn’t a coincidence that the IBA action against Khelif was taken after she defeated two top Russian boxers.
Absolutely spot on. I'm a political scientist and I and my colleagues agree this was another 1968, and Harris suffered the "Humphrey Syndrome."
What is that?
Here are some issues with your column:
1) The extreme left is not going away and wokeness will stay very much alive, and this will continue to antagonize the moderate Democrats and a lot of voters.
2) The names for the Democrats you have mentioned (none of them are moderates) have some alignment with the extreme left which will cause them major problems.
3) Also, there is some major infighting with the Democratic Party will could cause some headaches.
4) The Republicans will fight tooth and nail to keep the majorities in both houses of Congress.
5) The Republican Party (not Trump) is now hyper focused on the 2026 mid-terms and are aware of the lack of success for the party in power in a second term Presidency.
6) The Republican Party will do everything to maintain their new multi-cultural coalition.
7) The Democrats are hoping the Republicans will stumble which will give a fighting chance to re-gain the White House.
8) If Republicans have a modicum of success, they have a good chance in the 2026 mid-terms.
None of those people are anywhere near "extreme left", except perhaps AOC, and she is moderating her positions somewhat as Nate points out about the Squad.
Moulton's chief of staff just quite because he said he didn't want his daughters competing against boys on the athletic field.
Holy shit, really? Good riddance.
Link on this? I can't find it anywhere
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4981767-moulton-aide-resigns-transgender-athletes/
Snowflakes come in all shapes and sizes.
Get back to me when it happens to your daughter.
It doesn't happen except in Republican fever dreams.
About 60 athletes in the entire country is the estimate.
It's happened over 900 times so far
Moulton's a Democrat. Nobody on his team is breaking any stereotypes.
I'm sure that Moulton had some strong formal policy that forced his employees to make their children play sports, and especially that girls had to play "against boys".
Oh wait, no such policy existed?
The Former CoS is grandstanding about an issue. Probably teeing up a run for office and wanted the headline.
If no such policy existed then why resign from his staff?
TO CJ: What I said was "some alignment with the extreme left". Give proper context.
Quite a few people in the government have "some alignment with the extreme left". Eg. Ukraine support.
If you aren't going to be specific it is just guilt by association and not interesting.
Lol. "You know who else drank water?"
Exactly.
What does "some alignment" mean?
It is just more vague dimensionless Fox News "some people are saying" material.
Just as people got tired of people calling Trump a Nazi this strategy of calling every Dem "extreme left" is gonna get real old real fast.
Oh Trump started railing against the "radical left" years ago. There are still lots of Republicans who genuinely think antifa is, like, a group that dems think or care about. It's disheartening how effective it is.
For republicans reading, the same is true of dems calling every republican racist/bigots/anti-American/etc. It is transparently the result of successful propaganda.
Until I'm convinced that the Hispanic shift is "over" and that Hispanics won't just vote 57-43 Republican in 2028, then I view Nate's column as kind of an optimistic scenario for Dems. Since Dems largely struck out on moving the burbs more to their side, or at best are doing so much more slowly, they are in a world of trouble if the same trends from 2020-24 largely continue.
I'll confess straight up, I don't know enough about Hispanics to recommend wth to do, but obviously whatever they did the last four years didn't work. And they needed to do much, much better in suburban areas to vindicate this fluffy, social issue-focused, cosmopolitan, moderate-targeted strategy they ran with in 2024.
Unfortunately the real answer is that the Dems are fucked royally thanks to their own strategy of flooding the country with migrants. Hispanics are more conservative than whites. Most of Latin America is having a right wing renaissance now.
I'm a dem, but I see a strong silver-lining to this. I feel vaguely "betrayed" (in a very mild and abstract sense) that Hispanics have little loyalty to the party that has defended them, BUT I would love for this to represent a transition from the GOP seeing these demographic groups as "them" to seeing them as "us". Really, this is how it always should have been. These immigrants are mostly conservative and religious -- now imagine if republicans recognized the opportunity they've been wasting all this time and started advocating for secure borders AND humane treatment AND good paths to citizenship. It might weaken the democratic party, but for me at least it's much more important that the US embrace as a whole the value that immigrants have and have always had for this country.
And then Republicans have even think... hmm, maybe if we don't like abortion, we should start advocating for better sex ed, more available birth control, stricter requirements for child support, and more programs to help single mothers.
Honestly, there's a reality where Republicans are the party of compassion purely out of self-interest and ideological integrity. That would be wonderful to see. I could see myself being tempted by a party like that.
The Dems haven't defended Latinos, though. Latinos are very pro-life and don't like illegals, who make them look bad. They are very Catholic so why would they want better sex ed or birth control or subsidizing single mothers?
Here's an idea - how about we only help mothers who are married, to discourage single mothers and encourage marriage?
"Paths to citizenship" means amnesty, a terrible and unethical idea that Latino citizens are against!
You can guess where they stand on men in women’s sports.
So glad to see a post from Nate. It feels like last Tuesday was 500 years ago and I was worried.
I mean, my stomach is sick from contemplating all the hideous policies that could be implemented in the next two years. But yeah, it’s not all bleak.
But at least I will have my emotional support degen.
Something to look forward to.
Part of me thinks... he won the popular vote. Unless I'm so arrogant that I believe they're all idiots, I have to acknowledge that MAYBE they're right and Trump doesn't really mean the crazy things he says and his policies won't actually explode catastrophically.
I can't just abandon my senses and forget that he's a consummate narcissist, but who knows. Maybe it won't be so bad. I'll take one day at a time.
Next, write an appreciation of Republicans’ future, assuming the best, not the worst scenario
You don't generally write consolation posts to the winner, my friend.
Interesting you say you see a lot of soul searching on the Left. I hope that's true but my feed is filled with blame. I find all the blame aimed at my generation (GenX) to be the most weird to hear. Like hey wow people are paying attention to my generation :).
Probably just an artifact of the liberal Facebook groups I'm on.
I think it depends on who you listen to. Nate probably listens to moderate Dems, they are doing soul searching. The activists and MSM types, and the social media/reddit crazies are all in on the blame game. Dirty sexist latinx men!
Men:
Hillary - 41%
Biden - 45%
Harris - 42%
Women:
Hillary - 54%
Biden - 54%
Harris - 54%
Democrats need to stop nominating women. Men won't vote for them.
I think describing a situation where only 41.5% instead of 45% of men vote for a woman as “men won’t vote for them” is I think part of the problem.
Yeah im not sure the message from the last 8 years is that this country won't elect women to the white house. A woman has been on the ballot every election cycle, and the one with the lowest approval ratings won the popular vote at the top of the ticket, and in both times with a female candidate, they came close enough in the key swing states and the popular vote that i'm overall skeptical that a better candidate or climate can't win.
Female candidates have gotten closer to the white house than any non-white candidate ever did pre-obama.
These are the persuadable swing voters, obviously. Perhaps the Democratic Party will find another substantial group of the electorate that will change their mind, but I don’t know who that might be. Others have suggested working class voters that are economically populist but conservative socially (e.g., the old New Deal voters). Biden gave them a lot economically but they still didn’t vote for Harris.
Ultimately it will come down to how well the Republicans rule, which is how it should be. If Trump picks up House seats in 2026, then a major reordering of the party should be on the table. Failing that, the Democrats should stop nominating women for President.
The GenX thing is totally getting me, I haven't been called part of the 'slacker' generation in a long time :)
Gen X leans conservative and always has. We're the Reagan generation.
Totally. They’re acting like this is some news flash in 2024. No. Our generation has leaned red since Red Dawn, which as I’m typing that I’m realizing is a pretty meta sentence.
are those the stats? All my near age friends lean left at the very least but again that might just be me. Most of my friends are however somewhat anti authority and the Democratic Party has gone pretty heavy on its governing philosophy. I'd love to see really stats on all this and not just my anecdotal experience.
Depends somewhat on where you draw the Gen-X line.
https://abcnews.go.com/Elections/exit-polls-2024-us-presidential-election-results-analysis
50-64 year olds elected Trump.
Of course regional differences exist also, and exit polls are borderline fiction.
50-64 year olds got Trump the popular vote. Even if Trump had lost that demographic he could have still pulled off an EC win with enough support from Hispanics, who trend younger.
Sure - if one thing changed one way and another changed a different way, the first thing wouldn't have mattered.
Now imagine being a white GenX libertarian man like me. And I frickin' voted for Harris!
Of course, GenX only enters the chat when they are called on the carpet.
The Dems really need to STOP blaming and shaming half the electorate if they want their votes next time. Time for them to start winning hearts and minds.
Jon Stewart showed some democratic ads that painted a pretty grim picture of how much democratic messaging amounted to "no I am not the things they said I was!" I hope we democrats remember our identity as a party that stands FOR things, not just against them.
Here’s a thoughtful Dem:
https://samharris.substack.com/p/the-reckoning
Regarding the issue of “wokeness” and identity politics, I’d argue there’s a big gap between Harris’s campaign this year (she didn’t mention LGBT issues at all and rarely brought up her gender/race) and authors of Salon articles and TikTok creators. And I’d argue that the “anti-woke” backlash is more due to the unelected content creators than the actual words or actions of Democratic elected officials.
sister souljah wasn't an elected Democratic official either. Not saying crazy stuff yourself isn't enough, you need to publicly rebuke and disavow the crazies in your camp, and unlike Clinton, Harris didn't dare do that. Harris tried to please everyone and it failed.
Exactly - wow you put it all in a nutshell.
She had a very track record.
“One of the reasons that there tends to be a lot of mean-reversion in elections — majorities aren’t held for very long these days — is because healthy political parties react to their losses.”
While I agree in the abstract, it’s not at all clear the GOP did this between 2020 and 2024. And yet look at the results.
The results indicate that Trump probably would've lost absent inflation. He got very, very lucky that he ran in an environment that was overwhelmingly hostile to incumbent parties worldwide. If you plop this same election down in 2000, 2004, 2012, 2016, or 2020 he probably doesn't pull it out.
Or that he would have coasted to victory in 2020 absent Covid.
Very possible! Although most incumbents got an approval bump from it. The results basically matched the polls in February 2020, he may have been on track to lose this whole time. Biden looked on track to lose to Trump basically since inflation set in.
Most incumbents got an initial bump in the polls, just like Trump did. As time went on though their fates in actual elections? Nowhere near as rosy.
Very very lucky really? Moving the goalposts? Did not hear any of this last few months. Only heard that he was the most horrible candidate and Harris would win easily. I could counteract that he was unlucky due to Covid and lost in 2020.
You’re ascribing comments to me that I never made
Fair point. Sorry
No worries! Your point about Covid is valid, I just don’t think it invalidates the broader point that the gop didn’t really change after losing all three chambers in 2020.
Yeah that’s true, but if history is any guide the environment is going to be very, very hostile to the Republican Party in 2026.
I just continue to question the idea that going from 51% to 48% of the vote, in this political environment, necessitates a dramatic overhaul.
I think Dems are way better off in 2026 than 2028. Times have changed and they dominate the higher-engagement voters now. I could even see something like a 1994/96 combo coming where Dems do really, really well in 2026 and then mistakenly think that means they can do business as usual in 2028. Something like that happened at a smaller scale between 2022/24.
I agree with you, I think the thing working to Dems advantage in 2028 will be that Vance will probably be the nominee and democrats will probably nominate a change candidate who can turn the page on the last decade and a half in politics, which voters will probably be eager to do.
Regarding the tendency for Democrats to ostracize people that only half-agree with them, I feel like a big part of that is that the more individualistic Republicans, in general, have a tendency to lean towards "I'm entitled to my opinion" even when discussing things that are clearly not a matter of opinion (e.g. climate change, "immigrant crime," vaccines, etc.), whereas the more technocratic Democrats tend to favor more of a "follow the experts" approach even on issues that are clearly matters of opinion, where they tend to treat the personal biases of academics and such as matters of fact (most infamously the "racism is a public health emergency" PSA). So as a result of that (painting very broadly of course), Republicans have an easier time half-agreeing with people because they view disagreement as a difference of opinion whereas Democrats are more likely to view it as someone else being WRONG. So it's less an issue of one side being more tolerant than the other than it is both sides fundamentally misunderstanding the difference between a fact and an opinion, which leads to an unbalanced impact on places like Twitter. I have no idea how to address that or if I'm even right, but it seems like there might be something there, anyway.
You're entitled to your opinion.
"Republicans have an easier time half-agreeing with people because they view disagreement as a difference of opinion whereas Democrats are more likely to view it as someone else being WRONG."
At the risk of proving your point, that statement sounds absolutely insane to me. I can think of no evidence whatsoever to indicate that one party is more rational or capable of distinguishing fact from opinion than the other. Both parties put forth a full spectrum of narratives that appeal to the full spectrum of their constituents, with adjacent (meaning similarly-polarized) narratives neatly bundled for use in echo chambers intended to limit political drift. These narratives range from genuine ideological positions to outright lies. If you are willing to accept any narrative or set of narratives as representative of the party as a whole, you will be able to convince yourself of nearly anything--and that is, itself, its own subset of narratives, the purpose of which is to subtly position the other party as fundamentally lacking in some desirable trait.
"both sides fundamentally misunderstanding the difference between a fact and an opinion, which leads to an unbalanced impact on places like Twitter"
I agree with this as much as I disagreed with the previous statement.
"I have no idea how to address that or if I'm even right, but it seems like there might be something there, anyway."
My deep conviction is that real change will only come when/if people are are frequently exposed to other opinions and viewpoints in their real lives -- in a space that encourages empathy, compassion, a desire for connection, and a recognition of common ground. Unfortunately, I see a lot more "let's boycott the stores owned by our political rivals" than "let's take every opportunity to humanize those that people seeking to accumulate money and power would have me dehumanize."
I probably should have put a bit more emphasis on the "in general." Obviously there is a very wide range of viewpoints among individuals. But I don't think many would argue against the idea that Democrats have recently been leaning into a very technocratic/intellectualist direction, whereas Republicans have recently been leaning into a very anti-establishment, anti-intellectualist direction. Obviously there are individuals who don't fit that narrative, but as a whole that seems to be the direction they're pulling, and the education gap is quantitative evidence of that. So my hypothesis is that, given Nate's observation that Republicans have an easier time half-agreeing than Democrats (this may not in itself be accurate but I would say that personally--as a Democrat myself--my own observations tend to align with that), and given that we agree that both sides have difficulty differentiating between fact and opinion, I would guess that the deference to experts that is more common among Democrats might lead some to assume that because a so-called expert has an opinion then that opinion is fact, whereas with the distrust of institutions that Republicans tend to have, they might be more inclined to believe that their opinion is as good as anyone else's even on matters of established fact. Obviously one could come up with counter-arguments (religion being an obvious one), and it's just a hypothesis, but in any case that's where my reasoning came from.
I do agree that it's important to be exposed to different viewpoints, and one of the things that I think isn't talked about enough is how the geographic segregation of political beliefs harms our ability to meet in the middle and allows politicians to distract us by pitting us against each other. Maybe counterintuitively Trump's improvement from 2020 in places like California and New York will help with that.
Cancelled yesterday. notching to do with Nate or the model.
The elections over. The carnival is heading South for the winter..
See you in a year and a half!
So many dumbass takes in the comments these days
He did his job, as accurate of a poll based model as is possible
Even prediction markets weren't that far off
He doesn't share your exact specific political views, whatever, who does?
Such irritating takes
Go unsubscribe and stfu
He was wrong on popular vote by close to 4 points
Wrong in several states by several points
Not his fault but obviously begs the qn as to the value of polling when measuring somebody like Trump?
Or the delusional comments about how the polls could be overestimating Trump and underestimating Kamala?
There’s plenty to criticize even if we are subscribers
He was off by almost 4 points for very large values of 2.5.
After Dems being insufferable for the last 8 years it feels like its shifting and Republicans are becoming the more "whiny" party. Silver clearly thought trump would win but because he didn't say he was guaranteed to win they are butt hurt and retreating to the Fox News echo chamber.
Hey Nate - great post.
Quick typo check in your "Battle for the House" table (only because it's someone's name) - the elected representative in VA-10 is "Subramanyam", not "Subrananyam".
Nancy fkn Pelosi and her “this was not a repudiation of the Democratic Party” can go straight to hell. Our party leadership is the cronyist of cronyism and our loud online cohort are the most self defeating idiots that exist. Our party needs a full scale makeover.
And I didn’t even get to the most ineffective nincompoop in party leadership, chuck shumer.
Here’s an idea DNC - let us have the first actually competitive primary in 20 years in 2028? Wild idea right?! Instead of clearing the field for your hand picked crony of the 1990’s whose “turn it is to be president.”
If your party's leaders are corrupt cronies and your party's members are self-defeating idiots, have you considered that maybe you're in the wrong party?
We had a competitive primary in 2020, the only problem was most people didn’t want Bernie.
Bernie did by far the best in the first few states while mayor Pete was second. Coincidentally every centrist then dropped out and endorsed Biden while Warren stayed in and split the vote with Bernie. Pete then got a cabinet position and klobuchar in Senate leadership. Truly a coincidence, nothing behind the scenes at all!
And yet the Bernie/Warren staffers occupy a large number of government offices, and shaped a lot of policy!
Even though the centrists clearly won the primary, the left got a lot of authority in the new government.
Yeah, that's how parties work. They stick together in the election and share the spoils of victory.
i’m not sure what you’re insinuating. Joe Biden absolutely crushed Sanders in South Carolina, and the party quite understandably united behind the centrist with the highest name recognition and best immediate prospects for victory in 2020. And Joe Biden, you may recall, did in fact win the general election.
Isn't that.. how that's supposed to work? Are you suggesting Bernie deserved to win because moderate democrats were 'supposed' to split their votes amongst Biden, Pete, and co? A candidate who wins because of vote splitting is not a candidate who deserves it.
I'm just saying it's very clear the rest of the party united behind the scenes.
I'm saying there's nothing "behind the scenes" about it. They endorsed Biden publicly, that's as "in the open" as you can be – again, that's how [first past the post] voting is SUPPOSED to work.
Are you new to politics? That is how things work - people drop out, endorse someone, and get rewarded if that person wins.
I think your anger at Pelosi is misplaced. Not only did she know Biden was not the person to lead us to victory, she also thought the same about Kamala Harris.
Pelosi made the very valid point that the results in the House indicate that voters are not anti-Democratic party, especially given the national presidential vote.
Isn't this the best year for House Republicans in a presidential year since the 1920's? The R's have a pretty sizable lead in the national House vote, larger than Trump's. It's not showing up in the final tally of seats though because they are wasting votes by winning with a greater than 50% margin.
I expect that it will be close to the 2004 number when the dust settles.
Bush-Kerry saw Bush winning by 2.4%.
And the House vote was R+2.6
https://x.com/ForecasterEnten/status/1854894946756554761
2008 was no more a competitive primary than 2016 was. It was Hillary Clinton vs some guy running a populist groundswell against her both times. Neither of them featured anything like the competitive field that we had in 2004 and 2020.
Spoken like a true liberal elitist, Nate, your lengthy micro numerical analysis of how the Dems are going to come back in 2026 and that Trump will have a terrible 4 years as an unpopular president, you fail to mention the complete demise of the Democrat Party in the 2024 election and why that might be, and why it could still be true in future elections. The Democrats have completely lost the entirety of the working class people in America and I think they know it but won’t admit it, for to admit it they’d have to do something about it and the ruling party elites don’t want to lower themselves enough to come out and mingle with the hard working little people, the rednecks in the flyover states who keep this nation afloat, I don’t think they have the guts to change, which doesn’t bode well for them in the future. Sorry for the rant.
In a "wave" election where one party is arguably (though historically not for very long) crushed, the other party tends to win unexpectedly in lots of places. Not only do they win the presidency, but they also win a bunch of seats in congress and a few unexpected Senate seats. This...wasn't that. Yes, the Senate flipped, but the only really competitive Senate seat that the GOP flipped was Pennsylvania. The other three flips were in deep red states -- Montana, West Virginia, and Ohio. And on the House side, while the GOP will hang on to their majority, it's looking to be super tight (to the point where these GOP appointments Trump is making will make it tough for them to get anything done prior to those special elections), certainly a smaller majority than they have in the 118th congress.
Of course it will be hard for the GOP to get a lot done in the first few years, but better than the alternative by long shot, my only point being that the Democrat Party appeals to absolutely no one right now and until they win back some of middle America and the working class people, it doesn’t look promising for them in the near future. They’re going to need a complete overhaul in my opinion.
Absolutely no one? Might be hyperbole. How about the 73,000,000 million people who voted for Harris?
It’s 100% hyperbole, Eddie, commonly used to make a point. It’s just that Trump won 76 million people, but maybe next time the Dems, despite their bad policies, won’t vote for their party over working class Americans, although it won’t be easy to get them back now, sorry.
You shouldn’t use hyperbole to make a point in political debate. That’s what happened when Rs said eggs cost $10 a dozen. It was hyperbole, lies, disinformation. Trump and Vance wouldn’t have won without it. They lied to the working class. And the working class people who voted for T will soon see they were tricked and made a mistake. Just like the Arabs in Michigan.
Calm down Eddie, you need to get out more, maybe go to the grocery store to realize that prices did go up 25-30% since Biden got into office, when inflation was at 1.4% after Trump’s term and then was pushed up as high as 9.2% by Joe and Kamala. I will use whatever words I want to in any kind of a debate or at any time I want to and the fact that you sound like you’re within the ‘snowflake’ age range compared to my 50+ years, and you guys never did learn how to spell, let alone how to use words in a sentence, you’ll understand why your comments are meaningless, especially to someone who’s been through 20 times more elections than you. The democrat party needs to stop blaming everyone else, including ‘the Arabs’ for their huge loss and start looking within the party to find out what went so horribly wrong. Stay chill, Eddie.
What about the 215 or so congressional races Dems won? Or the swing seats they dominated in Senate elections?
Whatever it was, it wasn’t enough, was it? 😁 The Democrat Party’s policies were rejected on every important election issue except the abortion lie and the results showed that. Not going to get into back and forth’s with snowflakes over elections, when you’ve been through even a quarter the of elections I’ve been through, maybe your point will get through, but not until.
"Complete demise" -- what country's election are we talking about here?
It’s a figure of speech in our country, Daniel, you should know that. The future of the Democrat Party looks very, very sad right now, they appeal to no one and I don’t think they have the guts to change their attitudes towards the working class people and middle class Americans, they’ve been caught in their elitist bubbles, looking to each other to blame rather than looking within themselves as to what went so wrong.
The Democrats better hope it's 2004 all over again. Because the alternative is that it's 1980 all over again...
Yeah. Unfortunately the economy is in a good place, and the low information types who believe otherwise will credit Trump when they finally figure it out.
So it could be very similar to the Reagan cult.
Of course Reagan appointed competent administrators. Trump's sycophants may be able to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
I think it's pretty clear that Trump is lighting fires just to watch them burn.
Intellectual humility demands us to wait and see. After all it may work.
But color me... highly skeptical.
I am pretty certain the fires will indeed burn, but I agree about needing to give it time. :-)
Right. Best not to destroy credibility by being too eager to make premature predictions.
They’re weak in foreign affairs. A lot of them are sympathetic to Putin and want to hand him Ukraine. That will look very bad if he does that.
They are also going to spend a bunch of time trying to ensure political purity in their staff instead of doing their job.