Nate Silver: Trump Has About 5% Chance of Winning

Nate Silver: Trump Has About 5% Chance of Winning [GOP nomination]


September 15, 2015

Statistician and writer Nate Silver joins Anderson Cooper to share his evaluation of the Trump campaign.

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN: Our next guest made his reputation by picking the right polling data … to make much more accurate predictions, extremely accurate predictions. Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight.com joins us tonight to talk about what the numbers can and can’t say right now about the state of the race.

So it’s really fascinating because you put the chance of Donald Trump or Ben Carson actually getting the GOP nomination and put it around 5 percent.

NATE SILVER, FIVETHIRTYEIGHT: Maybe about 5 percent each, somewhere around there.

COOPER: Why so low?

SILVER: So there are couple things to think about. One is that if you look back at history, you’ve never seen candidates like Donald Trump certainly or Ben Carson win a party nomination. And secondly, if you look at the polling, a lot of times a candidate who is leading the polls now mid-September didn’t win the nomination, didn’t even come close. I think … people forget that polls five months before Iowa historically have told you very, very little. … Full report