Nate Silver expects ‘further decline ahead’ in Biden polls after debate

Pollster Nate Silver, the founder of ABC’s FiveThirtyEight, said he expects to see “some further decline” in President Biden’s poll numbers, as postdebate surveys are published in the days and weeks ahead.

Silver’s “2024 Silver Bulletin presidential election forecast” tipped slightly in former President Trump’s favor Monday evening, after the first batch of postdebate polls were released. The results proved to be “mostly poor for Joe Biden,” the pollster said in his latest update.

Trump leads Biden by 2.7 percentage points in Silver’s model’s national polling average, and Biden’s win probability dropped to 28 percent, down from 35 percent on debate night, per the forecast. Silver said he expects polls to continue in the same direction.

“Our guess is that more likely than not, there’s some further decline ahead: the model is trying to figure out whether this is random noise, but instead it’s almost certainly caused by a challenging first debate for Biden. It’s not great news for the president,” he wrote Monday.

The analysis comes after Biden’s shaky debate performance last week caused panic among some Democrats and as chatter surfaced about possibly replacing the incumbent president at the top of the Democratic ticket.

A concerted effort by the Biden campaign and the White House has sought to quell concerns in the party and reassure the public that he is best to take on Trump in November. The latest batch of polling suggests the campaign has a lot of work to do.

According to the Decision Desk HQ’s national polling average, Trump and Biden remain neck and neck, with Trump leading by 0.9 percentage points.

The Hill has reached out to the Biden campaign for comment.