Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 07:08 pm
Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com rolled out his 2016 general election forecast on Wednesday, and the odds don’t look so good for Donald Trump.
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According to Silver’s forecast model, Hillary Clinton has an 80 percent chance of becoming the next president.
“Trump faces longer odds and a bigger polling deficit than John McCain and Mitt Romney did at the same point in their respective races,” Silver wrote on Wednesday.
According to the new forecast, Clinton is favored to carry all of the so-called swing states. She also has a better than 50 percent chance of winning Arizona, something not done by a Democrat since 1996.
Missouri, a state President Obama lost by almost 10 points in 2012, is also a toss-up this year, according to the forecast.
As of today, Silver predicts that Clinton would carry upwards of 350 electoral votes compared to Trump’s 183 and win the popular vote by almost eight points.
While political pundits, myself included, were way off in their predictions that Trump would never win the Republican nomination, the team at FiveThirtyEight built a forecast model that was highly accurate during an unpredictable primary season. They correctly predicted 53 of 58 GOP primary races this year – a stellar record considering how volatile the campaign has been.
For the general election campaign, there is no reason to think the formula is flawed.
“It’s pretty much the same model that we used to successfully forecast the 2012 election,” Silver wrote.
Silver correctly called 48 of 50 states in 2008 and accurately predicted all 50 states in the 2012 election.
Sean Colarossi currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was an organizing fellow for both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns. He also worked with Planned Parenthood as an Affordable Care Act Outreach Organizer in 2014, helping northeast Ohio residents obtain health insurance coverage.
