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Nate Silver Gives Trump 25 Percent Chance to Beat Clinton
Monday, May 16, 2016 11:30 AM
By: Joe Crowe
Nate Silver, editor-in-chief of poll analysis website FiveThirtyEight, said Donald Trump has a 25 percent chance of winning the 2016 presidential election.
In an interview on CNN's "Reliable Sources," Silver said Hillary Clinton is more likely to win than her Republican opponent "if you held the election today."
Silver said he has been surprised by Trump's success. His site had predicted before the primaries that Trump had a 5-percent chance of capturing the Republican presidential nomination and would "flame out" during the primaries.
"This is one of the crazier things we've seen in politics for a long time," Silver said in the CNN interview.
The 25-percent prediction for Trump could also change, Silver explained, because of the possibility of world events continuing to shape voters' opinions. "You can have recessions, you can have terror attacks," said the editor-in-chief.
Silver noted that in his site's analyses, while he predicted that she would win, he said Hillary Clinton "is not a very popular candidate herself."
A Salon editorial about the 538 site pointed out that Trump's rise raises questions about Silver's website and its analysis of polls.
Silver has mentioned before that poll results should not lead to overconfidence, but the Salon editorial said that 538 might have become too confident in its own predictions when it made the 5-percent prediction about Trump.
In the CNN interview, Silver called on journalists to be more accountable about covering political news. He said Trump ran on "a lot of misinformation, and we're the information industry."
