FiveThirtyEight's polls-only model gives Clinton an 85 percent chance of winning and its polls-plus model gives her 83 percent.
Mostly true True in substance, wrong in a detail.
Factual: Statements about the present or the past, checked against the record: did they hold up?
The second judge would not resolve this claim; the verdict shown is the first judge's.
Said for an organisation they lead or work for; it counts on both records.
What would count as true or false
Judge against FiveThirtyEight's published 2016 forecast on the date the statement was made. True: the archived forecast for that date shows Clinton at 85% in polls-only and 83% in polls-plus, allowing rounding differences of up to 1 point. Mostly true: one figure is off by 1–2 points, or the figures match those of an adjacent day. Mixed: one figure matches and the other is off by more than 2 points. Mostly false: both figures are off by 3–5 points, or the figures are matched to the wrong model. False: the figures differ by more than 5 points from what was published around that date.
Set before the research began.
Evidence (4)
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E1 New Polls Show More Trouble for Trump and the GOP New York Magazine (Intelligencer) · 23 October 2016
“Overall, Clinton’s chances of winning the presidency are 87 percent according to our polls-only model and 85 percent according to polls-plus.”
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E2 Rethinking probabilistic prediction in the wake of the 2016 U.S. presidential election arXiv (academic paper by statisticians)
“For example, on October 24, 2016, Silver Silver1024 estimated Clinton’s probability of victory at 83–85%.”
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E3 Donald Trump's collapse was caused by one big factor: Hillary Clinton Salon · 24 October 2016
“FiveThirtyEight’s model, which averages polls, shows that Clinton has an 85 percent probability of winning and is currently ahead by 6.6 points.”
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E4 Sins of omission Washington Examiner · 9 May 2025
“On Oct. 27, 2016, FiveThirtyEight’s polls-plus forecast gave former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton a 75.2% chance of winning the election, while RCP had Clinton up 3 points, within the margin of error.”
Reasoning
E2, an academic paper, reports that Silver put Clinton's chances at 83–85% on October 24, 2016. Salon reported 85% on the same day (E3). That matches the claimed pair, but neither source says which model gave which figure. The day before, FiveThirtyEight had Clinton at 87% polls-only and 85% polls-plus (E1), so polls-plus ran slightly below polls-only, which fits the claimed split. Because the evidence doesn't say outright which model gave which figure, and the claim is dated only as 2016, the verdict is mostly true rather than true.
Cite this claim
Nate Silver, “FiveThirtyEight's polls-only model gives Clinton an 85 percent chance of winning and its polls-plus model gives her 83 percent.” (said 2016). Verdict: mostly true. Reliability API, claim c_7b5a15f521da, method 0.1.0+28da144b, dataset release v1.1.2. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_7b5a15f521da
This claim is in dataset release v1.1.2, with the same verdict.
Reply to this claim
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As of early October 2024, the US presidential election is about four weeks away.
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Verdicts are made automatically; how verdicts are made.