President Donald J. Trump greets guests on the South Lawn of the White House Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2020. (Official White House photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)
Polling guru and FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver believes the determinations by Fox News and the Associated Press that Democratic candidate Joe Biden won the state of Arizona should be "retracted."
"I don't know, I guess I’d say that Biden will win Arizona if you forced me to pick, but I sure as heck don’t think the state should have been called by anyone, and I think the calls that were previously made should be retracted now," he wrote in an election update Wednesday night reported by the Washington Examiner.
Prior to the election, Silver gave Trump only a 10% change of being reelected.
Fox News was the first news outlet to call Arizona and its 11 Electoral College votes for Biden, drawing a public rebuke from the Trump campaign.
CNN, NBC News and CBS haven't called Arizona for either candidate.
Trump campaign manager Jason Miller demanded a retraction and President Trump telephoned Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch.
The director of the Fox News decision desk, Arnon Mishkin, explained on air Tuesday night that after "a half-hour of debating," the team concluded it had been "clear for a while that the former vice president is in the lead in Arizona and was most likely to win the state."
Trump, however, has narrowed the margin since Election Day, and the Trump campaign estimates that two-thirds to 70 percent of the remaining votes will go to Trump, adding up to a margin of about 30,000 in the president's favor.
Biden, with 89% of the votes counted, has a 2.2% lead.
Trump 2020 campaign manager Bill Stepien told reporters Wednesday that the campaign remains "confident in our pathway."
"We are confident in our math. We said all along we are viewing some of these races as math equations,” Stepien said. "If we count all legal ballots, the president wins."
Stepien said that along with Arizona, Trump likely will win Georgia and Pennsylvania, where he's currently ahead, but also Nevada, Michigan and Wisconsin, where he trails.
Sean Trende, senior election analyst at Real Clear Politics, told the Daily Caller that Arizona is "still up in the air."
The Trump campaign held a news conference in Phoenix on Thursday in which campaign adviser David Bossie and others declared the Grand Canyon State is still "in play."
See the news conference:
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