EXIT STRATEGY

Nate Silver Makes Bold Prediction About Trump Exit Scenario

The election forecaster believes the GOP’s midterm losses could push Trump toward a wild move.

Polling analyst Nate Silver says he has a “weird intuition” that President Donald Trump might “quit” after the GOP’s midterm catastrophe.

The election forecaster, who correctly called the blue wave that handed Democrats both chambers of Congress on Tuesday, made his prediction while explaining that “Republicans made a deal with the devil in Trump.”

“I mean that in the sense of, like, you get your three Supreme Court justices, you get tax breaks for the wealthy, but you pay a lot of price for that, right? Because Trump has so sucked out the oxygen from anybody else in the Republican party,” he told his co-hosts on the Still Counting podcast.

Turning to Vice President JD Vance’s political future, Silver pointed out that then-Vice President Kamala Harris’s failure to distance herself from then-President Joe Biden hurt her campaign in 2024.

Noting that it used to be more common for vice presidents and presidents to be “rivals,” he then declared, “I mean, that’s part of why I had just a weird intuition that maybe Trump will find some pretense... to quit, you know what I mean?”

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“Because he could get very, very, very isolated, and that also could make him dangerous,” Silver continued, arguing that the lame-duck president has “no f---ing leverage” with Republicans.

“He has lost the fear factor,” he added.

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The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Vance, 42, has already begun trying to distance himself from his boss, blaming Trump’s deeply unpopular war with Iran for the party’s historic losses in a striking statement on X.

“To the people who are p---ed off and want to say, ‘I told you so’: you’re right, you did tell us so. Take that energy into electing Republicans who share your worldview,” he wrote, sounding much like a candidate on the campaign trail.

But Silver named Florida Governor-elect Byron Donalds when asked whom he would put on the Republican ticket to give the party its best chance in 2028.

Silver isn’t convinced the worst is necessarily behind the GOP.

“I know the ‘smart’ conventional wisdom is that midterms don’t predict future election results,” Silver wrote Wednesday in a post on X, which featured a graph comparing Trump and George W. Bush’s abysmal approval ratings at this point in their second terms. “But then I look at this. And 2006 is the only modern lame-duck term with a wave like this.”

Republicans lost control of both chambers of Congress in 2006, then suffered another major defeat two years later when Barack Obama beat John McCain in the 2008 presidential election.

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