Many pundits and political analysts have dismissed President Joe Biden’s chances of winning re-election in 2024 following the president’s poor performance in the debate against former President Donald Trump in June.
Since the debate, the polls have swung in Trump’s favor and the electoral odds continue to show Trump’s chances of winning following the assassination attempt against him in Pennsylvania.
But at least one predictive model indicates the election isn’t over yet. FiveThirtyEight, a site that tracks polling data and statistics, currently shows Biden will win the election 53 times out of 100 in its simulations. The site calculates these simulations using polling data, historical trends and “fundamentals” like the state of the economy and the mandate.
About FiveThirtyEight: Nate Silverstatistician, writer and professional poker player, founded FiveThirtyEight, which refers to the number of electors in the electoral college, in 2008. ESPN acquired FiveThirtyEight in 2013 before ESPN’s parent company, Walt Disney Company DIStransferred operations of FiveThirtyEight to ABC News in 2018. Silver left the site and took his data analysis methodology with him in 2023 to start a new site, a blog called “Silver Bulletin” and has been critical of FiveThirtyEight’s new predictive model.
Read also: Trump’s ‘first glaring mistake’ after winning nomination, says Anthony Scaramucci as ex-president picks JD Vance as running mate: Pollster says ‘not the choice… to maximize chances of winning presidency’
Silver, who gives Biden much less chance of winning the election than his previous site, posted on X that Trump’s election Senator J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) as his vice president may help Republicans win Ohio, but overall hurts Trump’s chances of winning.
Silver posted a blog titled “JD Vance Offers Democrats an Opportunity” arguing that Vance could make it difficult for Trump to present a unifying platform. OnTheIssues.org, which analyzes politicians based on their statements, calls Vance a “hardline conservative” who is further to the right than Trump on certain social issues.
Silver’s new site, Silver Bulletin, shows Biden’s chances of winning the election have fallen to about 27% after the debate, compared with FiveThirtyEight’s 53%. In 2016, Silver’s model showed Trump had about a 30% chance of winning the election, much higher than most other sites.
Survey data: Current polls show Trump leading in almost all key states, but as many political campaign followers know, polls can be inaccurate and misleading. In 2016, most polls showed Hillary Clinton with a landslide lead heading into the election, which Trump won.
Photo: Shutterstock
