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Renowned statistician Nate Silver released his final model for predicting the US election and concluded that the outcome was “literally closer than a coin toss.”
This year, it ran 80,000 simulations of the contest between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.
Harris won 40,012 of those simulations, while Trump won 39,988.
Silver said Harris did not emerge victorious in 39,988 simulations, and of those, 39,718 were outright wins for Trump.
The remaining 270 simulations resulted in a tie in the Electoral College, Silver said, adding that this would have led to a Trump victory via a vote in the US House of Representatives.
“This is my fifth presidential election – and my ninth general election overall, counting the midterms – and nothing like this has ever happened,” Silver wrote.
Silver’s prediction comes just days after the poll The Des Moines Register and Mediacom in Iowa found Harris leading Trump in the state, 47 percent to 44 percent.
That margin falls within the poll’s 3.4-point margin of sampling error and suggests there is no clear front-runner in a state that has generally been rated as solid in the Republican column during this year’s campaign.
The findings suggest a shift toward Harris compared to a previous Iowa poll in September, which showed a narrow lead for Trump.
Iowa has a mixed record in the last four presidential elections, defeating Barack Obama in both 2008 and 2012, while Trump won in 2016 and again in 2020.
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