Election analyst Nate Silver has suggested that Donald Trump could leave office before completing his term if Democrats seize control of Congress for his final two years in the White House.
The former ABC contributor had accurately forecast a “blue tsunami” ahead of Tuesday’s elections. Democrats won at least 54 Senate seats and 250 House seats, although several races remained undecided.
Speaking on his podcast, Still Counting, Silver described a scenario in which Trump could step down before his term ends.
“I had just a weird intuition that maybe Trump will find some pretense to quit, you know what I mean? Because he could get very, very, very isolated, and that also could make him dangerous,” Silver said.
Silver argued that although Trump is not “evil,” he offered Republicans a political bargain that he may no longer be able to fulfill.
“I just think that Republicans made — I was searching for a more original metaphor — but a deal with the devil in Trump, right? And I don’t mean that to mean that he’s evil. I mean that in the sense of, like, you get your three Supreme Court justices, you get tax breaks for the wealthy, but you pay a lot of f***ing price for that,” he said.
He also accused Trump of having “sucked out the oxygen from anybody else in the Republican Party.”
Silver said Trump could potentially step aside to give JD Vance the advantages of incumbency.
Election analyst Nate Silver (pictured) suggested Donald Trump could leave office before his term ends if Democrats take power during his final two years in the White House
Silver said Trump is not “evil,” but argued that he offered Republicans a bargain he can no longer deliver
Silver said Trump’s final two years would be unusual because the president had “lost the fear factor” and much of the influence he once held over Republicans.
Former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson said the possibility was “not that far fetched.”
The Daily Mail has contacted the White House for comment.
Silver had been confident about liberals’ prospects of overtaking Republicans in the November 3 elections. Three weeks earlier, his model gave Democrats a 94 percent chance of winning the House and a 75 percent chance of capturing the Senate.
In an interview with The New York Times’ Ezra Klein, Silver said a Democratic sweep could prove “momentous.”
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“If the election goes roughly as the polls say it will go, then in some ways it would mark the end of the Trump era, I think,” Silver said.
Although Trump would “still be President for two more years,” Silver said the results would make him “a super lame duck,” comparable to George W. Bush after the 2006 midterm elections.
He added that Democratic victories in states such as Kansas and Texas could signal “generational turnover.”
Silver also suggested that Trump could step aside and allow JD Vance to benefit from incumbency
Polling analyst Silver said that a Democratic victory in both chambers of Congress would mark “the end of the Trump era”
“After 2024, there was talk of a permanent conservative vibe shift, that Democrats were on their back heels and Biden had failed and wokeness was dumb,” he said.
In his Silver Bulletin newsletter, the forecaster cited New York Times/Siena polling published on the final day before the elections as evidence that a “blue tsunami” was approaching.
Democrats had already picked up 40 House seats, with 27 races still undecided, while also gaining seven Senate seats. Two additional Senate contests remained outstanding and were still favoring Democrats.
Democrats flipped Senate seats in states where they had not won in decades, including Texas and South Carolina, as well as Kansas in what was described as a once-in-a-century victory.
They could also capture two more Senate seats in Mississippi and Alaska if late-counted votes break in their favor.
In the House, Democrats had 253 confirmed seats, a gain of 38, with 25 contests still unresolved.
The party also won the governor’s office in 29 states, giving it a majority for the first time in 16 years.
Democrats further secured “trifectas” in several states, meaning they now control the governorship and both chambers of the state legislature.
Trump blamed the losses on weak candidates and his absence from the ballot, while others attributed the results to the president’s policies and the Iran War.