Silver said that all the scientific polls after the first 2016 presidential debate showed Clinton had won by a pretty emphatic margin.
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?
What would count as true or false
True: all scientific (probability-based or otherwise methodologically sound) snap or post-debate polls on who won the 26 September 2016 debate showed Clinton winning by a wide margin, roughly 15 points or more. CNN/ORC's 62–27 is one example. Mostly true: every scientific poll showed Clinton winning, but one or two by a smaller margin. Mixed: most showed a clear Clinton win, but at least one scientific poll showed a narrow result or a tie. Mostly false: the scientific polls were split or narrow overall. False: the scientific polls showed Trump winning or no clear winner.
Set before the research began.
Evidence (4)
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E1 2016 United States presidential debates - Wikipedia Wikipedia
“Writing on September 28, FiveThirtyEight found that every scientific poll to that point had suggested that voters thought Hillary Clinton performed better than Donald Trump in the debate.”
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E2 Hillary Clinton Won the First Debate by Every Metric New York Magazine (Intelligencer) · 27 September 2016
“Meanwhile, Public Policy Polling found Clinton winning by a margin of 51 to 40 percent.”
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E3 2016 United States presidential debates - Wikipedia Wikipedia
“A CBS News poll shows that 32% of likely voters say that they thought better of Clinton after watching the debate, but only 10% of voters said that they thought better of Trump afterward.”
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E4 Hillary Clinton Won The First Presidential Debate, Polling Finds HuffPost · 28 September 2016
“By a 27-point margin, 49 percent to 22 percent, Americans who had heard at least something about Monday’s presidential debate said that Clinton did a better job than Trump.”
Reasoning
E1 reports FiveThirtyEight's finding that every scientific poll up to September 28 suggested voters thought Clinton did better in the first debate. E4 shows one post-debate poll with Clinton ahead by 27 points (49–22), which is an emphatic margin. E2 shows Public Policy Polling with Clinton ahead 51–40, an 11-point lead, below the roughly 15-point bar set for "emphatic." E3 uses a "thought better of" question rather than a who-won question, so it does not count toward the criteria. Every scientific poll in the evidence showed Clinton winning, but at least one did so by a smaller margin, which fits "mostly true."
Cite this claim
Nate Silver, “Silver said that all the scientific polls after the first 2016 presidential debate showed Clinton had won by a pretty emphatic margin.” (said 11 October 2016). Verdict: mostly true. Reliability API, claim c_9d43e4d013bf, method 0.1.0+28da144b, dataset release v1.1.2. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_9d43e4d013bf
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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Mostly true
“The previous Quinnipiac polls of these states had been quite a bit better for Harris.”
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Resolved true
“Although John McCain had periods of strong polling in 2008, especially after the Republican Convention, in the end Barack Obama won in a landslide that didn’t justify Democrats’ constant anxieties.”
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Resolved true
“The recognition that the election is only four weeks away.”
As of early October 2024, the US presidential election is about four weeks away.
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Resolved true
“And yet, there are dozens of polls released every week.”
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Mostly true
“This property is even more profound in baseball, where single-run leads are relatively durable because runs tend to come in bunches and the default outcome is not to score at all.”
Verdicts are made automatically; how verdicts are made.