Election guru Nate Silver accuses pollsters of putting ‘finger on the scale,’ lying to keep presidential race close
Polling guru Nate Silver lashed out at other survey junkies in his field for “cheating” in the final stretch of the 2024 presidential election — accusing them of recycling some results to keep the race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris close.
The FiveThirtyEight founder said irresponsible pollsters were “herding” their numbers, or using past results to affect current ones, to keep Vice President Harris and former President Trump within a point or two of each other each time.
“I kind of trust pollsters less,” Silver said on his podcast, name-checking Emerson College. “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 fumed.
“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 vented.
“You are lying! You’re putting your f–king finger on the scale!’”
Silver’s own vaunted model puts Trump ahead of Harris, 55% to 45%, as voters prepare to head to the polls in just three days.
His scorn also extended to “all these GOP-leaning firms” showing the former president narrowly ahead each time to project that they’re “not going out too far on a limb.”
“If a pollster never publishes any numbers that surprises you, then it has no value,” he said.
Silver blasted most other pollsters except for the New York Times, saying the rest were “just f–king punting on this election for the most part.”
“But look, all seven swing states are still polling within it looks like a point and a half here,” he hedged.
“It doesn’t take a genius to know that if every swing state is a tie, that the overall forecast is a tie.”
Trump, 78, is currently leading Harris, 60, in both the national (+0.3%) and swing-state (+0.9%) averages of recent polls aggregated by RealClearPolitics.
The two were deadlocked in the final New York Times/Siena College poll earlier this month at 48%.
Silver was slightly less data-driven in a recent Times op-ed on the contest, in which he admitted his “gut says” Trump will win.
“In an election where the seven battleground states are all polling within a percentage point or two, 50-50 is the only responsible forecast,” Silver wrote.
“Yet when I deliver this unsatisfying news, I inevitably get a question: ‘C’mon, Nate, what’s your gut say?’” he went on. “So OK, I’ll tell you. My gut says Donald Trump. And my guess is that it is true for many anxious Democrats.”
Over the past eight years, pollsters have discussed how Trump supporters are notoriously difficult to include in surveys, creating a “nonresponse bias” that nukes the results.
“It’s not that Trump voters are lying to pollsters; it’s that in 2016 and 2020, pollsters weren’t reaching enough of them,” Silver explained in his op-ed.
