Had Clinton done 2 percentage points better across the board in 2016, she would have received 307 electoral votes and the polls would have called 49 of 50 states correctly.
Unresolvable The public record could not settle it.
Factual: Statements about the present or the past, checked against the record: did they hold up?
Said for an organisation they lead or work for; it counts on both records.
What would count as true or false
Apply a uniform 2-percentage-point improvement for Clinton to the certified 2016 state results. Accept either a 2-point gain in vote share or a 2-point shift in margin, whichever matches Silver's stated method if he gave one. Then compare the resulting state winners with the final state polling averages Silver referred to. True: the shifted results give Clinton 307 electoral votes, and the polling-average favourite wins 49 of 50 states. Mostly true: one figure holds exactly and the other is off by a small amount, for example electoral votes within about 10 of 307, or 48 states called correctly. Mixed: only one of the two figures holds and the other is off by more than that. Mostly false or false: both figures are clearly wrong under any reasonable reading of '2 points better'.
Set before the research began.
Evidence (9)
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E1 2016 Electoral College Results National Archives (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration) · 5 November 2019
“Electoral Vote* | Winner: 304 | Main Opponent: 227 | Total/Majority: 538/270”
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E2 Pollsters: We didn’t blow US election POLITICO Europe · 4 May 2017
“In the 13 states decided by 5 points or fewer, the polls underestimated Trump’s margin against Clinton by 2.3 points.”
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E3 presidential_general_election_2016.csv Prooffreader (GitHub repository election_2016_data)
“20.0,20.0,Overall 2016 Pennsylvania Presidential Election Results,republican,True,D. Trump,1,99.8,Pennsylvania,48.8,2912941”
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E4 presidential_general_election_2016.csv Prooffreader (GitHub repository election_2016_data)
“20.0,Overall 2016 Pennsylvania Presidential Election Results,democrat,False,H. Clinton,2,99.8,Pennsylvania,47.6,2844705”
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E5 presidential_general_election_2016.csv Prooffreader (GitHub repository election_2016_data)
“15.0,15.0,Overall 2016 North Carolina Presidential Election Results,republican,True,D. Trump,1,100.0,North Carolina,50.5,2339603”
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E6 2016 United States presidential election - Wikipedia Wikipedia
“In state-by-state tallies, Trump earned 306 pledged electors, Clinton 232. They lost respectively two and five votes to faithless electors.”
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E7 2016 United States presidential election - Wikipedia Wikipedia
“Michigan, 0.23% (10,704 votes) – 16 electoral votes”
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E8 2016 United States presidential election - Wikipedia Wikipedia
“Florida, 1.20% (112,911 votes) – 29 electoral votes”
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E9 An Evaluation of 2016 Election Polls in the United States AAPOR Ad Hoc Committee on 2016 Election Polling
“polls, which indicated the wrong winner in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – states that collectively were enough to tip the outcome of the Electoral College.”
Reasoning
The evidence gives Trump 306 pledged electors to Clinton's 232 (E7). It also lists margins of 0.23% in Michigan (E8) and 1.20% in Florida (E9), and shows Trump ahead 48.8% to 47.6% in Pennsylvania (E4, E5). A 2-point shift would flip all three, bringing Clinton to 297 electoral votes. Reaching 307 also depends on Wisconsin, whose margin is not in the evidence, and on whether states like North Carolina would flip. The evidence also does not show the final state polling averages, so the claim that polls would have called 49 of 50 states correctly cannot be checked: E10 only says the polls picked the wrong winner in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Cite this claim
Nate Silver, “Had Clinton done 2 percentage points better across the board in 2016, she would have received 307 electoral votes and the polls would have called 49 of 50 states correctly.” (said 9 November 2016). Verdict: unresolvable. Reliability API, claim c_3ddea993a2cb, method 0.1.0+28da144b, dataset release v1.1.2. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_3ddea993a2cb
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
“It’s not hard, for instance, to find polls from this point in 2015 showing Hillary Clinton with double-digit leads over Trump.”
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Mostly true
“There was never any spike in Biden's approval rating.”
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Resolved true
“This is the pollster that had shown a big bounce for Garcia before, so either that previous poll was an outlier or her momentum has been usurped by Wiley.”
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Mixed
“Instead, there was a modest polling error, well in line with historical polling errors, but even a modest error was enough to provide for plenty of paths to victory for Trump.”
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Mostly true
“The single most important reason that our model gave Trump a better chance than others is because of our assumption that polling errors are correlated.”
Verdicts are made automatically; how verdicts are made.