Editor of popular FiveThirtyEight blog says polling and demographics data shows Donald Trump to be clear underdog
Election analyst Nate Silver has predicted that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has an 81 percent chance of winning the White House, with Republican rival Donald Trump at 19%.
Silver’s forecast, his first statistical model of the 2016 race, sees Trump as “a fairly substantial underdog” based on polling and demographic data. It predicts Clinton winning 353 electoral votes to Trump’s 183.
An alternative model offered by Silver, which also takes into account the state of the economy and historical voting trends, gives Trump only marginally better prospects: 26% to Clinton’s 76%.
Silver, the Jewish editor of the FiveThirtyEight blog has gained a reputation in US politics for his accurate predictions in the 2008 and 2012 elections.
His prestige suffered a blow recently over his failure — along with the rest of the news media — to predict Trump’s victory in the Republican primaries. He has since said this was due to his failure to adhere to his own methods.
“She’s taking a seven-point, maybe a 10-point lead into halftime,” Silver told ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
“There’s a lot of football left to be played, but she’s ahead in almost every poll, every swing state, every national poll,” he said of Clinton.
US President Barack Obama will campaign with Clinton for the first time next Tuesday.
The Democratic pair is scheduled to visit Charlotte, in the swing state of North Carolina, where they will “discuss building on the progress we’ve made and their vision for an America that is stronger together,” Clinton’s campaign said in a statement Wednesday.
Their debut joint campaign appearance for the 2016 election had been scheduled for June 15 in Wisconsin, but was postponed due to the massacre in Orlando, Florida — the worst mass shooting in US history.
Obama endorsed Clinton on June 9 after months of assiduously avoiding tipping the scales of the Democratic presidential primaries.
“I don’t think there’s ever been someone so qualified to hold this office,” Obama said in a video message that day as he offered his full-throated endorsement of the former secretary of state, senator and first lady.
“I’m with her, I am fired up, and I cannot wait to get out there and campaign for Hillary,” added Obama, who won a brutal, months-long Democratic primary battle against Clinton in 2008.
As reported by The Times of Israel