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1 week ago | 
natesilver.net | Nate Silver |Eli Mckown-Dawson
We’re excited to announce that we’ve added two new features to our Trump approval ratings dashboard. First, we’re now tracking his approval ratings on a series of issues that have been especially salient early on in his presidency: the economy, immigration, trade/tariffs, and inflation:As you can see, the issue approval pattern from Trump’s first term — when the economy was generally his strongest issue, but he was often fighting losing battles on the “culture wars” — has somewhat reversed.
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2 weeks ago | 
natesilver.net | Eli Mckown-Dawson |Nate Silver
Today, Canadians will head to the polls to decide how to form their next government. Throughout 2023 and 2024, polling suggested the country’s next federal election would be a rout for the Conservative Party. Justin Trudeau — Canada’s previous prime minister and a member of the Liberal Party — was deeply unpopular, and it looked like Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre would have no trouble replacing him. Something changed in 2025.
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1 month ago | 
natesilver.net | Eli Mckown-Dawson
The Republican party thought they’d won a slim majority in the U.S. House of Representatives (218 to 216) in the 1930 midterm elections. The 72nd Congress opened thirteen months later — this was before the 20th Amendment moved Congress’s start date to January. But by then, the breakdown of the chamber was 219 to 213 in favor of Democrats. How come? Fourteen Representatives-elect died between November 1930 and December 1931.
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2 months ago | 
natesilver.net | Eli Mckown-Dawson
We understand it might not seem like the most important thing at the moment. But a big part of our mission here at Silver Bulletin is evaluating public opinion — and that mostly means polls.
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Jan 16, 2025 | 
natesilver.net | Eli Mckown-Dawson
We’re 656 days out from the 2026 midterms. Is it way too early for us to write anything about them? Yes. But there’s one group who’ll have to start thinking about 2026 even before we do: pollsters. If you’re one of our election-minded subscribers, you already have a good idea of what topline polling error looked like last year. Short answer: not great, but we’ve seen worse. So are we going to see any major changes to how polls are conducted in the future? We talked to a bunch of pollsters to find out.
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Nov 3, 2024 | 
natesilver.net | Eli Mckown-Dawson
It’s been quite the weekend for high-profile poll releases. Last night, Ann Selzer’s new poll showed Kamala Harris leading by 3 points in Iowa. And this morning we got polls of all seven major battleground states from NYT/Siena. But our forecast has been hovering right around 50/50 since mid-September. Donald Trump gained ground in mid-October, and Harris has regained just a little bit now, but it’s always remained comfortably within toss-up range.
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Oct 24, 2024 | 
natesilver.net | Eli Mckown-Dawson
It was once a political truism that the GOP had the more regular and reliable voters, educated suburbanites who voted even in municipal elections. So Republicans tended to do better in lower-turnout elections — better in midterms than in presidential years, for instance.
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Oct 16, 2024 | 
natesilver.net | Eli Mckown-Dawson
The presidential race is really close. You know it, I know it, and pretty much everyone but the most motivated partisans know it. As of Tuesday, our forecast gives Kamala Harris a 50 percent chance of winning the Electoral College … and Donald Trump has a 50 percent chance too. That’s obviously about as close to a pure tossup as you can get. If you squint at the polling averages, things also getting closer.
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Oct 3, 2024 | 
natesilver.net | Eli Mckown-Dawson
In our last Model Talk, we discussed 128 possible paths to the White House based on different combinations of who wins the seven major swing states. Some scenarios (like Donald Trump or Kamala Harris sweeping all seven states) happen fairly often in the 40,000 simulations our model runs, but others are really unlikely. Trump winning every swing state but Arizona? Surprising. Harris losing Pennsylvania and Michigan but winning Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina? Really surprising.
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Sep 27, 2024 | 
natesilver.net | Eli Mckown-Dawson
We’re 39 days out from the election and people are starting to freak out about the polls — and unskew them using some less-than-rigorous methods. Could a bad poll for your favorite candidate just come down to sampling variation? Nope, the poll must be broken because recalled 2020 vote among Hispanic women with college degrees who live in rural areas and make more than $100,000 a year looks weird. Needless to say, you shouldn’t pay attention to this stuff.
