WHAT ARE THE ODDS

Nate Silver Reveals ‘Insane’ Pattern in Final Election Forecasts

The election forecaster has revealed a striking pattern between his model and prediction markets.

Polling guru Nate Silver has flagged an ‘insane’ trend between his polling numbers and prediction markets.

The statistician, whose FLIPR model projects an almost certain Democratic House takeover and an 80 percent chance of a Senate win, pointed out on X Tuesday morning that prediction markets are closely tracking his polling average.

“Pretty insane agreement between prediction markets and final FLIPR forecasts,” he wrote.

He noted that Polymarket bettors are more bullish than the FLIPR forecast on Democrats in Alaska and Missouri, but more skeptical in states where polling has historically missed the mark, such as Iowa, Kansas, and Maine.

“But the average state is only 3 points different,” he wrote.

Prediction markets burst onto the election scene in 2024, when Polymarket and Kalshi forecast Donald Trump’s victory weeks before Election Day, while polls showed a toss-up.

Silver’s final polling average showed Kamala Harris at 48.6 percent, and Trump at 47.6 percent.

Prediction markets’ track record, however, has been far from spotless. In Brazil’s presidential election last month, Polymarket put Flávio Bolsonaro’s chances of winning at about 80 percent on Election Day, only for incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to prevail with 51.8 percent of the vote.

Silver compared his FLIPR forecast of gubernatorial races with Polymarket’s predictions in another post, noting that the overall correlation was “again quite high,” even as FLIPR gave Democrats somewhat lower odds.

The sharpest divergence came in Nevada, where Polymarket bettors put an 81 percent chance on Republican governor Joe Lombardo losing to his Democratic opponent Aaron Ford. FLIPR put it at just over 50 percent.

Silver suggested that bettors were already “pricing in assumptions about early-voting data and/or the vote count so far today.” Early voting data in Nevada has favored Democrats, who took a six-point lead in turnout, according to the Reno Gazette Journal.

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Writing in his Silver Bulletin Substack, Silver said it would be a “major surprise” if Democrats don’t win back control of the House on Tuesday.

He also argued that Democrats hold sufficiently large polling leads in enough key Senate races that Republicans will likely need “something systematic to be off with the polls” to hold onto their majority.

“If I were placing my bets, I might wager some chips on the ‘Dems slightly underperform polls but win the Senate anyway’ spot on the felt and some on ‘Republicans narrowly hold the Senate,’ but also a few on an epic Democratic blowout,” Silver wrote.

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Erkki ForsterNight News Reporter

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