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BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: If I've had one person send it to me I've had five people send me this idea that Nate Silver is out predicting that Trump doesn't have a chance to win the presidency. Have you seen this, Snerdley? (interruption) Well, yeah. Let me tell you something: Nate Silver used to be a god in the New York Times, and he's not a pollster. He's a renowned pollster analyst. Meaning he found algorithms and software programs and bots and all kinds of things to analyze all the data in all the polls. And what he would do is...

Nate Silver has spoken: Hillary Clinton will be the next President. The famed political pollster — whose past presidential predictions have been freakishly accurate — said Wednesday he gives the presumptive Democratic candidate a 79% chance of winning the White House come November. Her loud-mouthed Republican rival, Donald Trump, has only a 20% chance of winning, Silver said. “We're kind of at halftime of the election right now, and she's taking a 7-point, maybe 10-point lead into halftime,” Silver, founder of the political analysis website FiveThirtyEight, said on “Good Morning America.”

Hillary Clinton has a nearly 80 percent chance of winning the White House in November, FiveThirtyEight polling guru Nate Silver predicted Wednesday. FiveThirtyEight projected Clinton has a 79 percent chance of winning the general election against Donald Trump, who has just a 20 percent chance of succeeding President Barack Obama in the Oval Office. “Here’s how to think about it: We’re kind of at halftime of the election right now, and she’s taking a seven-point, maybe a 10-point lead into halftime,” Silver told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on “Good Morning America.” “There’s a lot of football left to be played, but...

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): I’m not ready to accept yet that we’ll have a whole new map this time around. There will probably be some differences, yes. But my prior is that we’ll still have mostly the same swing states as last time, and I haven’t seen persuasive enough evidence yet to convince me otherwise. Here’s why: These polls are showing huge, enormous numbers of undecided voters. In that Monmouth poll of New Jersey, for instance, it’s Clinton 38 percent and Trump 34 percent, leaving 28 percent undecided, voting third party or saying they’ll sit out the general...

Trump’s nomination shows the need for a more rigorous approach.~~~SNIP ~~~1. Our early forecasts of Trump’s nomination chances weren’t based on a statistical model, which may have been most of the problem. 2. Trump’s nomination is just one event, and that makes it hard to judge the accuracy of a probabilistic forecast. 3. The historical evidence clearly suggested that Trump was an underdog, but the sample size probably wasn’t large enough to assign him quite so low a probability of winning. 4. Trump’s nomination is potentially a point in favor of “polls-only” as opposed to “fundamentals” models. 5. There’s a...

In September 2015, writer and statistician Nate Silver urged people to "calm down" about the possibility of Donald Trump winning the Republican presidential nomination. Two months later, he wrote that the media should "stop freaking out about Donald Trump's polls" and that Trump's odds were "higher than 0 but (considerably) less than 20 percent." Six months after that, after Ted Cruz had dropped out of the race but before John Kasich had done so, Silver wrote: "Donald Trump is going to win the Republican nomination."

Nate Silver was a once respected pollster. His polls were accurate a lot of the time, though they always had a left wing bias. Now, Silver has completely lost it, predicting a Mark Zuckerberg-David Petraeus ticket. Not only does Silver predict such a ridiculous idea as a presidential ticket, he also claims that Zuckerberg-Petaeus would win 428 Electoral College votes.(GRPHIC-AT-LINK)Earth to Nate Silver, Mark Zuckerberg isn’t even 35 years old yet and therefore not eligible to be President of the United States. What dope Nate Silver is smoking, I’d like to get my hands on some. This guy has completely...

Facebook is spending millions to keep Mark Zuckerberg alive At Facebook, security is a top priority — that is, security for CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The social-networking giant spent more than $5 million last year on bodyguards and other measures to protect Zuckerberg and his growing family, according to a regulatory filing. The cost to protect Zuckerberg topped $6.2 million in 2014, up from $3.2 million the previous year, according to the filing. In all, the company has shelled out $14.5 million on security for the CEO over the past three years. Apparently, Zuckerberg presents a much bigger target than rival...

The Republican nomination is going to be close. Nate Silver has Trump coming up short. I have Trump winning by a slim margin. I am looking at some states where I likely underestimated Trump’s delegate count more than enough to matter. Connecticut A new Connecticut Poll came out on April 10-11. That’s just one poll, but it’s significant. Moreover, if Trump wins big in New York on Tuesday, April 19, momentum will likely carry over for the Connecticut primary a week later. According to Green Papers, Connecticut awards 13 at-large delegates in a winner-take most fashion. If someone gets over...

Donald Trump's path to clinching the Republican nomination ahead of the party's July convention is looking increasingly improbable, according to FiveThirtyEight editor in chief Nate Silver. Silver's latest delegate projection for Trump showed him finishing at 1,155 delegates — 82 short of the 1,237 needed to secure the GOP bid heading into the convention. That number came from Silver's "deterministic" model — which looked at the most likely outcome for Trump in each state. In Silver's prior projection, Trump picked up 1,208 delegates, still short of the needed number but conceivably an easier difference to overcome. That projection came before...

Donald Trump has had a good run of numbers lately. While his victory in New York this week was expected, he got 60 percent of the vote, more than the roughly 55 percent projected by the polls. He appears headed for victories in Maryland and Pennsylvania, which vote on Tuesday. He’s gained ground in California and is narrowly ahead of Ted Cruz in the first public polls of Indiana. He’s added about 2 percentage points over the past two weeks in our national polling average. But with Trump’s path to 1,237 delegates on such a knife’s edge, every percentage point...

It could all come down to 53 micro-primaries in California. Three weeks ago, when we last took a detailed look at Donald Trump’s quest to win 1,237 delegates, his path looked rocky but endurable. The panel of eight experts FiveThirtyEight assembled projected Trump to wind up with 1,208 by the time California and four other states finished counting their votes on June 7, a number that would leave him tantalizingly close to clinching the Republican presidential nomination — probably close enough that he’d be able to get over the hump by persuading some uncommitted delegates to come his way before...

Donald Trump has 39 percent of the vote in our Pennsylvania polling average, 37 percent in California, and 39 percent in Maryland. If this were February or early March, that would leave him without much to worry about. Even if Trump picked up zero undecided voters, he’d be pretty much guaranteed a win with the rest of the vote divided between a half-dozen opponents. But those days are over. In Wisconsin on Tuesday, Trump had 35 percent of the vote — the same share that allowed him to win New Hampshire easily in February, and a larger percentage than he...

It’s not that hard to imagine a contested convention. In fact, with Donald Trump’s path to 1,237 delegates looking tenuous, especially after his loss in Wisconsin on Tuesday night, it’s a real possibility. And it’s not hard to see how Republicans might think of Kasich or Ryan as good nominees. If Republicans were starting from scratch, both might be pretty good picks, especially from the perspective of the party “establishment” in Washington. But Republicans won’t be starting from scratch, and the “establishment” won’t pick the party’s nominee. The 2,472 delegates in Cleveland will. And most of them will be chosen...

Sanders beats Clinton in Michigan Dem primary, Fox News projects Published March 08, 2016 Fox News projects that Bernie Sanders will beat Hillary Clinton in the Michigan Democratic primary, marking a huge upset victory for the Vermont senator. This is the ninth and largest state that Sanders has won so far in the Democratic presidential campaign.

Bernie Sanders pulled off his biggest win of the Democratic presidential race on Tuesday, defeating Hillary Clinton in the Michigan primary on a night which also confirmed strong anti-establishment support for Donald Trump in the battle for the Republican nomination. In an industrial state hit hard by the decline of manufacturing, the Vermont senator’s consistent opposition to free trade deals appears to have been a decisive factor, but he also showed signs of weakening Clinton’s dominance among African American voters. The shock victory – by a margin of around 3 percentage points when his win was first projected by Associated...

According to our final polls-plus forecast, Hillary Clinton had a greater than 99% chance of winning the Michigan primary. ---FiveThirtyEight, 3:43 PM EST, March 8, 2016. Oops! Or rather, a massive OOPS!!! The FiveThirtyEight blog is considered to be the gold (or rather silver since its founder is Nate Silver) standard in election predictions. So when it is so wildly off the mark as happened last night as Bernie Sanders pulled off an astounding primary victory upset in Michigan over Hillary Clinton, it is definitely quite notable. So how to excuse this error? Actually, credit must go to 538 analyst Harry Enten who...

If you think the arguments between the Republican candidates have been bad, well, you ain't seen nothing yet. Pundits, reporters and political analysts are going to really have at it. Two competing theories about the Republican race are about to come to a head, and both of them can claim a victory of sorts after South Carolina. The first theory is simple. It can be summarized in one word: Trump! The more detailed version would argue the following: * Trump has easily won two of the first three states. * Trump is ahead in the polls in pretty much every...

First, here are the biggest "losers." Nate Silver. Back in November, this liberal media darling and alleged prediction guru told the world that Trump had no real chance at the GOP nomination and that his poll numbers were nothing to be concerned about because they were likely to fade before any votes were cast. ... Frank Luntz. Luntz unequivocally declared that Trump was dead, gone and finished. Trump's poll numbers only got better from there. ... Rich Lowry & National Review. Lowry deserves to be singled out for his hilariously inaccurate and inappropriate analysis that Carly Fiorina had surgically removed...

FiveThirtyEight provides two projections for each race: A "polls-only" model that is based solely on public polling within a particular state, and a "polls-plus" model that additionally factors in national polling and endorsements from sitting governors and members of Congress. Looking at the Monday-night Iowa caucuses, the two models are more or less in agreement about each party's favorites: businessman Donald Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In the Republican race, the polls-plus model gives Trump a 46% chance of winning, compared with 39% for Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, 14% for Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, and...