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This is pretty much what I said Tuesday but it’s nice to have company. Writing an opinion piece for the NY Times, pollster Nate Silver says the polls definitely show the race is a dead head, meaning there’s no way to predict the winner with any certainty. It’s going to be a coin toss.
However, Silver says people ask him all the time what his “gut” tells him. And rather than dodge the question, he just comes out and says it. It feels like Trump is going to win.
So OK, I’ll tell you. My gut says Donald Trump. And my guess is that it is true for many anxious Democrats.
But I don’t think you should put any value whatsoever on anyone’s gut — including mine. Instead, you should resign yourself to the fact that a 50-50 forecast really does mean 50-50. And you should be open to the possibility that those forecasts are wrong, and that could be the case equally in the direction of Mr. Trump or Ms. Harris.
For Silver, he seems to find it somewhat more plausible that the current tie in the polls is masking some Trump strength. After all, Trump’s support has been underestimated twice before.
.the likely problem is what pollsters call nonresponse bias. It’s not that Trump voters are lying to pollsters; it’s that in 2016 and 2020, pollsters weren’t reaching enough of them.
Nonresponse bias can be a hard problem to solve. Response rates to even the best telephone polls are in the single digits — in some sense, the people who choose to respond to polls are unusual. Trump supporters often have lower civic engagement and social trust, so they can be less inclined to complete a survey from a news organization.
