Nate Silver has some good news for the Clinton campaign in the wake of Monday’s presidential debate.
Polling aggregation website FiveThirtyEight cautiously reports that early post-debate polls suggest Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton can expect to gain in “horse-race polls” over Republican rival Donald Trump over the course of “the next week or so.”
Nate Silver, the statistician and polling expert with a long history of accurate predictions, reported on Wednesday that “Every scientific poll we’ve encountered so far suggests that voters thought Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump in Monday night’s debate. In fact, some of them showed her winning by a wide margin — wide enough to make it a good bet (though not a guarantee) that she’ll gain in horse-race polls against Trump over the next week or so.”
Silver, who successfully predicted the outcome in 49 of 50 states during the 2008 presidential elections, points to two polls that were released on Wednesday “that tested Clinton’s standing against Trump after the debate.”
- “The first poll is from Morning Consult, which shows Clinton leading by 3 percentage points in a matchup that includes third-party candidates — that’s a 4-point swing toward Clinton from the 1-point Trump lead that Morning Consult showed before the debate. In a head-to-head matchup against Trump, Clinton leads by 4 points, up from a 2-point lead before the debate.”
- “The other survey is from Echelon Insights, and it shows Clinton leading Trump by 5 percentage points, since she led Trump by just 1 to 2 points overall before the debate, based on FiveThirtyEight’s projection.”
Turning to his predictions for the 2016 presidential race, Silver uses three polling models:
- Polls-only forecast – What polls alone tell us about the Nov. 8th election.
- Polls-plus forecast – What polls, the economy and historical data tell us
- Now-cast – Who would win if the election were held today
Silver’s current projections reflect the following:
- Polls-only forecast shows Clinton winning by a margin of 15,8% with 57.9% to Trump’s 42.1%.
- Polls-plus forecast shows Clinton winning by a margin of 13.2% with 56.6% to Trump’s 43.4%.
- Now-cast shows Clinton winning by a margin of 25% with 62.5% to Trump’s 37.5%.
The Polls-plus forecast, preferred by Liberals Unite, shows Clinton defeating Trump in November with 278.9 Electoral Votes to Trump’s 258.9 and with Clinton receiving 46.5% of the popular vote as compared to Trump’s 45.1%. Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson is predicted to win 0.2 Electoral Votes with 7.1% of the popular vote. Green Party Jill Stein was not listed in the predictions.
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