Can You Predict an Election?
Americast
BBC
4.3 • 3.1K Ratings
🗓️ 5 September 2024
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week is all about predictions, polling and risk taking - what do current polls tell us about who might win the 2024 presidential race? We get a behind the scenes look at how statisticians make their predictions, and how accurate they are. Our guest Nate Silver developed a forecasting system which correctly predicted the outcome of the presidential election in 49 out of 50 states in 2008, and all 50 states in 2012. He also talks to Marianna and Sarah about his new book on risk - On the Edge - and his journey from professional poker playing to politics.
HOSTS: Sarah Smith, BBC North America Editor Marianna Spring, BBC Disinformation & Social Media Correspondent
GUEST: Nate Silver, U.S. election forecaster and stastician. Founder of FiveThirtyEight and the Silver bulletin, and author of On The Edge.
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This episode was made by Keiligh Baker with Purvee Pattni, Catherine Fusillo and Claire Betzer . The technical producer was Mike Regaard. The series producer is Purvee Pattni. The senior news editor is Sam Bonham.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts. |
| 0:04.7 | Mariana, here's a question for you. |
| 0:06.3 | Do you remember that we all had to come up with predictions for the election |
| 0:10.1 | and put them in the Americas time capsule, |
| 0:12.4 | or hostages to fortune, they might be better described as. |
| 0:15.2 | I do and I remember that particularly because Justin did come up with some fairly unusual time capsulecapsual predictions, one of which was that neither Donald |
| 0:26.3 | Trump nor Joe Biden would be on the ballot and that has half come true. I'm trying to |
| 0:30.6 | remember what mine was. Mine was that AI won't have the kind of impact we necessarily think it will. |
| 0:36.0 | And I almost feel like that's kind of starting to come true a little bit. |
| 0:40.0 | What was your Sarah? |
| 0:41.0 | I think I predicted that Donald Trump would pick a woman as his |
| 0:44.9 | Vice President so that was wrong Anthony got it right when he guessed it would be |
| 0:48.2 | JD Vance sorry predicted not guessed it would be JD Vance and And someone, and I have a horrible feeling it might |
| 0:55.1 | have been me, said there probably won't be any presidential debates and that's not come true |
| 0:59.1 | because we had one of the most consequential presidential debates in history when Donald Trump |
| 1:03.2 | against Joe Biden and we've got another one with Kamala Harris and Donald |
| 1:07.1 | Trump coming up next week so I am not doing well I don't think on the predictions |
| 1:10.8 | game. I kept mine sufficiently vague that I can |
| 1:14.9 | basically determine if it's correct by making it about AI and disinformation and |
| 1:20.4 | social media. And I guess Sarah now that we've got less than two months to go |
| 1:24.7 | perhaps you should officially seal this time capsule to see whether lots of the other |
| 1:29.2 | stuff comes true or doesn't. Is there anything you want to add in as a last minute addition? |
... |
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