Nate Silver gives Hillary Clinton 93% odds of beating Bernie Sanders

Nate Silver, the polling analyst of FiveThirtyEight fame who correctly and definitively called the 2012 election at at time when most other pollsters thought it was too close to call, is speaking up on the 2106 election – and specifically the democratic party primary nomination race. Even as much of the media attempts to paint Hillary Clinton as being in trouble and Bernie Sanders as having momentum, Silver says the polls tell him just the opposite. In fact he’s assigning Clinton a 93% or better chance of defeating Sanders in the primary race.

Silver’s latest missive serves in part as a defense of Bernie Sanders against those who are attempting to paint him as merely being the “Donald Trump of the left.” He points to several key differences in what they stand for and how they’ve approached the election, but he also points out what’s obvious to anyone who studies the national polls rather than relying on misleading headline soundbites: Bernie is behind Hillary by “about 20 percentage points in national polls that include Joe Biden, and by 30 points in polls that don’t.” In other words, her massive lead is still massive, and despite the massive media hype over the summer, little has changed in terms of actual popularity. He goes on to handicap the odds in both primaries.

“What Sanders and Trump have in common is they’re both unlikely to be nominated,” he males clear before adding “If I were laying odds, I’d put either one at something like 15-1 or 20-1 against.” For those with a calculator handy, that means he’s giving Hillary Clinton a 93% (15-1) to 95% (20-1) chance of winning the democratic party primary. In case his message wasn’t clear enough, Nate Silver goes on to state that Bernie Sanders is “unlikely to be nominated” and if he did somehow win the nomination, he would be “unlikely to prevail next November.” In other words, this is still Hillary Clinton’s race to lose.