Empirical wizard Nate Silver didn't have an algorithm for Donald Trump a year ago when he called the real estate mogul "The World's Greatest Troll" who would not garner the GOP nomination.
But now with a year of making tweaks under his belt, Silver must be confident in his current prediction that Trump has a 19 percent chance to win the presidential election. Not so, he tells
Politico's "Off Message" podcast.
"It makes me a little worried that nobody was like, 'You are wrong,'" Silver the founder of FiveThirtyEight.com told Politico.
Silver told Politico that missing so badly on Trump back in July of 2015 was humbling and made him smarter.
"It was a fairly sane and very defensible and kind of, in some cosmic sense, correct forecast," Silver told Politico. "I think the problem was that we never built a model for this until pretty late. … So I kind of learned how I make all the same mistakes as people I criticize unless I have some organized way of looking at things, right?"
Fast forward a year and Silver, though he has adapted and improved his forecasting, now tangles with a topsy-turvy electorate that his highly unpredictable. With two unlikable candidates, Silver told Politico the challenge in forecasting is in the undecideds as well as the potential number of candidates who could actually run for president.
"My gut is that there is going to be a fairly significant third- and fourth-party vote, and people under-voting the top of the ballot," Silver told Politico.
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