Election guru Nate Silver is accusing pollsters of putting their finger on the scales and lying to keep the presidential race close

Pollster Nate Silver criticized other poll junkies in his field for “fraud” in the final stretch of the 2024 presidential election, accusing them of skewing some results to keep the race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris closer.

FiveThirtyEight's founder said irresponsible pollsters are “fudging” their numbers or using previous results to influence current ones, keeping Vice President Harris and former President Trump within a point or two of each other every time.

“I kind of trust the pollsters less,” Silver said on his podcast name-checking Emerson College. “Y'all, every time a pollster says, 'Oh, every state is just plus one, every single state is a draw,' no! You are a real shepherd dog! You're cheating! You’re cheating!” he seethed.

“If you survey 800 people in dozens of surveys, your numbers aren't all going to add up to exactly one point,” Silver said.

“You lie! You put your damn finger on the scale!'”

Silver's own vaunted model sees Trump leading Harris 55% to 45% as voters prepare to go to the polls in just three days.

His disdain also extended to “all these Republican-leaning companies,” each time giving the former president a curt thumbs-up to suggest that they “don't bother each other too much.”

“If a pollster never releases numbers that surprise you, then they have no value,” he said.

Silver criticized most other pollsters except the New York Times, saying that the rest were “mostly just speculating on this election.”

“But look, all seven swing states are still in the polls, it looks like a point and a half here,” he threw off.

“It doesn’t take a genius to know that if every swing state is a draw, the overall forecast is a draw.”

Trump, 78, currently leads Harris, 60, in both the national (+0.3%) and swing state averages (+0.9%) of recent polls aggregated by RealClearPolitics.

In the latest New York Times/Siena College poll earlier this month, the two were tied at 48%.

Silver was a little less data-driven in a recent Times op-ed on the contest, admitting that his “gut feeling is” that Trump will win.

“In an election where the seven battleground states are all within a percentage point or two, 50-50 is the only reliable prediction,” Silver wrote.

“But when I break this unsatisfactory news, I inevitably get a question: 'Come on, Nate, what's your gut saying?'” he continued. “All right, I’ll tell you. My gut feeling says Donald Trump. And I suspect this is true for many concerned Democrats.”

For the past eight years, pollsters have discussed the notorious difficulty of including Trump supporters in polls, leading to “non-response bias” that distorts results.

“It’s not that Trump voters are lying to pollsters; It’s because pollsters didn’t get enough of them in 2016 and 2020,” Silver said in his editorial.

Data companies could collect false information from voters about who they voted for in the last election, Silver also said.

He went on to point out that party registration is now about the same in many places, saying, “About the same number of people now identify as Republican.”

Silver has publicly analyzed the election results since Barack Obama's victory over John McCain in 2008 and currently writes on his own Substack called “Silver Bulletin.”