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Guest Essay

By Frank BruniKristen Soltis Anderson and Nate Silver

Mr. Bruni and Ms. Anderson are contributing Opinion writers. He reported from Raleigh and Goldsboro, N.C. Mr. Silver is the author of “On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything.”

Frank Bruni, a contributing Opinion writer, hosted a written online conversation on Friday, Nov. 1, with Kristen Soltis Anderson, a contributing Opinion writer and Republican pollster, and Nate Silver, the author of “On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything” and the newsletter Silver Bulletin, to discuss polling and politics in the final days of the race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Frank Bruni: Kristen, Nate, thank you for joining me. Election Day is almost here, and still it seems that nobody really knows anything. Democrats fret — that’s their nature. MAGA Republicans strut, emulating their idol. And you two? Nate, because you recently wrote a widely read guest essay for us about your gut auguring a victory by Donald Trump, I want to check on your gut now. Guts change. Has yours?

Nate Silver: Well, the whole point of that article — including the headline — was that I don’t think my gut is worth anything in this case. Many people interpreted it differently, as though I was revealing my super-duper secret real prediction. And I expected that. But your gut feeling a week before the election will mostly be an emotional response or picking up on the vibes through osmosis — Republicans are invariably more confident so that seeps through — and I don’t think either of those things will help you make a better prediction.

Kristen Soltis Anderson: Whenever people ask me who I think will win, and I steadfastly refuse to tell them — because I don’t feel confident we know how this is going to go given the available data — people get very frustrated. It is understandable, we all want certainty. People want to mentally or emotionally prepare for an outcome. They don’t like surprises. And I’m sorry to say, you should continue to mentally and emotionally prepare for a wide range of outcomes.

Silver: For what it’s worth, though, the models have been pretty momentumless lately, whereas Harris had been falling in mid-October. Prediction markets are also shifting more in line with the models, showing a 50-50-ish race. Maybe it’s dawning on people that this is an uncertain and close race.

Bruni: Nate, you bring up that dread 50-50 number. Kristen, you mention frustration. I want to talk about the frustration of this pesky “tie” word. I distrust it. I abhor it. A tie is very, very unsatisfying — and how can it really be? As narrative, the Harris-Trump face-off doesn’t play: Chapter 1, it’s a tie. Chapter 5, a tie. Chapter 10 … a tie! Is that truly possible? Please illuminate. Not just for me but also for many readers like me, please administer some tie therapy — including, if possible, your thoughts on how likely the result could be far from a tie?

Silver: There’s something like a 40 percent chance in our model that one candidate wins all seven battleground states. Since polling errors tend to be highly correlated — if Trump beats his polls in Michigan, he’ll likely also do so in Pennsylvania — even a minor polling error could lead to a relatively decisive result in the Electoral College (whether or not Trump will admit it if he loses, which he almost certainly won’t).

But people want models to be oracular and offer a very precise prediction. And sometimes their value instead is in emphasizing the uncertainty in the contest.

Anderson: Nate’s model is on target. A 60 percent chance that the race is truly fairly close and we are counting well into Wednesday and beyond, but a 20 percent chance on either side that this will be wrapped up quickly with one candidate taking the battlegrounds in short order sounds about right. And that’s what people fail to understand when we throw around the word “tie.” They think it means we are confident it will be a very close race. They think there is certainty that this is neck-and-neck. Pollsters have been trying to be better about communicating about uncertainty this year, but I fear it hasn’t broken through.

Silver: The other thing is that the conventional wisdom tends to exaggerate even small polling swings — we went from 55-45 in Harris’s direction to 55-45 for Trump, and people are treating it as though we’ve gone from likely Harris to Trump being a sure thing. The narrative about Trump having momentum was sort of vaguely, loosely true — he’s in a better position than immediately after the debate, for instance — but also grossly exaggerated. Still, Democrats aren’t used to this. In 2008, 2012, 2016 and 2020, they went into Election Day as the clear favorite — wrongly in 2016, of course.

Bruni: I know you two focus on numbers, evidence, what’s measurable, but please tap your wealth of political experience, from close observation over so many years: What one factor, among the many factors in the foreground of this race, do you think could turn out to be much more consequential than we’ve imagined? Venture a best guess, an informed hypothesis. This will be my personal tie therapy from you.

Silver: Well, it’s Trump who’s relying more on marginal, unlikely voters, while Democrats do well with the upscale suburbanites. Those voters can be hard to capture in polls.

Anderson: When the polls have missed in the last few elections, the consensus is that it is because of polls missing some kind of unlikely voter. In 2012, this was a driver of some pollsters’ overestimation of Mitt Romney’s chances. In 2016 and 2020, it was Trump’s unlikely voters who were missed.

Silver: They also might not show up, especially sort of the Theo Von-Joe Rogan younger male demographic. And Harris should have the better ground game, with Trump sort of having turned his over to Elon Musk. It’s probably the difference of at most half a percentage point, but the election could come down to that.

Anderson: When pollsters make decisions about their samples and what weights to apply, they are making an educated guess about what turnout will look like, but it is just that — an educated guess.

Bruni: Many of the people in my life keep telling me that Harris will win because Trump has revealed such dark colors so very obviously that he won’t, all said, be able to get enough voters to risk him again. I say to them: That sounds like the 2016 confidence that he’ll lose in a new outfit. But could they be right? Could it really come down to that: Trump seeming — to a decisive cohort of voters — an act of recklessness and nihilism too far?

Silver: It’s hard when Democrats have had the same message — this is the most important election of your lifetime, so vote for us, or democracy gets it — three elections in a row. You’ll have people voting on Tuesday who were 9 years old when Trump first descended the escalator at Trump Tower.

Bruni:........

© The New York Times