In Silver Bulletin's final model, Harris won all swing states except Arizona in about 4 percent of simulations.
Unresolvable The public record could not settle it.
Factual: Statements about the present or the past, checked against the record: did they hold up?
What would count as true or false
Judged against Silver Bulletin's final 2024 presidential model simulation outputs or published scenario breakdowns. True: the share of simulations in which Harris won all seven swing states except Arizona is roughly 3.5% to 4.5%. Mostly true: about 3% to 5%. Mixed: the figure is about 2-3% or 5-6%. Mostly false: the figure is clearly different (e.g. 1-2% or 6-8%) though the scenario was real. False: far from 4% (e.g. under 1% or over 8%), or the model published no such scenario.
Set before the research began.
Evidence (3)
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E1 Kamala Harris' chances of winning a landslide, according to Nate Silver Newsweek · 4 November 2024
“Vice President Kamala Harris' chances of winning seven key swing states and securing a landslide victory are 12.6 percent—nearly half the 21.4 percent likelihood of former President Donald Trump achieving the same result, according to pollster Nate Silver.”
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E2 Kamala Harris' chances of winning a landslide, according to Nate Silver Newsweek · 4 November 2024
“Silver's model suggests that Trump winning all of these swing states is the most likely scenario, and a Harris clean sweep is the second most probable outcome.”
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E3 Top polling guru reveals final election prediction model – it couldn’t be any closer The Independent · 5 November 2024
“In Silver’s model, Harris won the Electoral College in 50.015 percent of the 80,000 simulations, giving her a razor-thin lead.”
Reasoning
E1 reports that Silver's model gave Harris a 12.6 percent chance of winning all seven swing states, and E2 ranks the clean-sweep outcomes. E3 confirms the final model ran 80,000 simulations and that Harris won 50.015 percent of them. None of these sources gives the share of simulations in which Harris won every swing state except Arizona, so the roughly 4 percent figure cannot be checked against the criteria.
Cite this claim
Nate Silver, “In Silver Bulletin's final model, Harris won all swing states except Arizona in about 4 percent of simulations.” (said 7 November 2024). Verdict: unresolvable. Reliability API, claim c_02fadfda3042, method 0.1.0+28da144b, dataset release v1.1.2. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_02fadfda3042
This claim is in dataset release v1.1.2, with the same verdict.
Reply to this claim
More factual claims by Nate Silver
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Resolved true
“a Trump sweep of the swing states was actually our most common scenario, occurring in 20 percent of simulations.”
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Resolved true
“Part of why I've moved the model back to the newsletter, where the probabilities are paywalled, technically”
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Mostly true
“launching FiveThirtyEight was basically my fourth career after management consulting, professional poker, and baseball analytics.”
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Resolved true
“I’ve turned on the option for paid subscriptions.”
Nate Silver turned on paid subscriptions for the Silver Bulletin newsletter by 11 September 2023.
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Mostly true
“Overall we were quite happy and the forecasts were largely accurate and well-calibrated despite a bad year for the polls.”
Verdicts are made automatically; how verdicts are made.