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Famed polling expert Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight said former President Donald Trump has a slight edge over Vice President Kamala Harris in what is a "pure toss-up" ahead of Election Day on Tuesday (November 5).
Silver's model showed Trump had a 51.5% chance of winning the Electoral College and Harris at 48.1% in his latest Substack post update shared Sunday (November 3) morning.
“[New York Times] swing state polls good for Harris but not great. Morning Consult swing state polls good for Trump but not great,” Silver wrote on his X account. “It’s a pure toss-up.”
Silver, who recently said his "gut" was telling him that Trump would defeat Harris, previously claimed irresponsible pollsters were "herding" their numbers, or recycling past results to affect current ones, in order to make it seem like the two candidates were within a point or two margin.
“I kind of trust pollsters less,” Silver said on his podcast, specifically naming Emerson College as an example.
“They all, every time a pollster [says] ‘Oh, every state is just plus-one, every single state’s a tie,’ no! You’re f**king herding! You’re cheating! You’re cheating!” he added.
“Your numbers aren’t all going to come out at exactly one-point leads when you’re sampling 800 people over dozens of surveys,” Silver continued. “You are lying! You’re putting your f**king finger on the scale!'”
Silver's model previously Trump leading Harris by a 55% to 45% margin last week. The pollster also chastised "all these GOP-leaning firms" that had Trump narrowly ahead each time in an effort to not go "out too far on a limb."
“If a pollster never publishes any numbers that surprises you, then it has no value,” Silver said.
Silver claimed most polls were "just f**king punting on this election for the most part," but made an exception for the New York Times.
“But look, all seven swing states are still polling within it looks like a point and a half here,” he said.
Silver gained notoriety for successfully predicting 49 of 50 states in the 2008 presidential election, as well as former President Barack Obama's re-election win in 2012 and Biden's win in the 2020 election. The pollster was, however, criticized for giving Hillary Clinton a 71.4% chance of winning over Trump after the former president 304 electoral college votes to win the election.
"I think people shouldn’t have been so surprised," Silver told the Harvard Gazette in 2017. "Clinton was the favorite, but the polls showed, in our view, particularly at the end, a highly competitive race in the Electoral College. We had him with a 30 percent chance, and that’s a pretty likely occurrence. Why did people think it was much less than that? I think there are a few things."