Donald Trump could "rack up several wins in a row if he wins Iowa," according to Nate Silver. | Getty Nate Silver 'much less skeptical' that Trump can win

Nate Silver's persistent doubts regarding Donald Trump's chances of winning the Republican nomination are falling, if his recent FiveThirtyEight analysis is any indication.

"Even if the GOP is mostly in disarray, my assumption was that it would muster whatever strength it had to try to stop Trump. But so far, the party isn’t doing much to stop Trump. Instead, it’s making such an effort against [Ted] Cruz," the ESPN polling guru wrote in a post published Thursday afternoon, titled, "One Big Reason To Be Less Skeptical Of Trump."


While maintaining a sense of skepticism about Trump's chances, Silver ticks through a list of recent circumstances that would appear to be working in the Manhattan mogul's favor. Those events include Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad remarking earlier this week that he hoped Cruz lost his state's caucus because of his stance on ethanol subsidies; former vice-presidential nominee Bob Dole telling The New York Times that Cruz's nomination would result in "cataclysmic" losses for the party in the general election; a lack of help from his Republican Senate colleagues in the brouhaha over his constitutional eligibility; and the fact that an anti-Cruz PAC has formed and is planning to run ads in Iowa, while no anti-Trump effort has yielded any PAC advertising of note this month.

"Can we take this a step farther, in fact? Can we say that the party has decided … for Trump?" Silver asks (emphasis his), before positing, "it may be that Republicans think of Cruz as the more immediate threat, and then plan to turn around and attack Trump later."

Trump, he added, could "rack up several wins in a row if he wins Iowa," increasing the degree of difficulty for any Republicans wishing to take him down after that point.

FiveThirtyEight, and Silver in particular, have cast consistent skepticism over Trump's chances, in no small part due to his numbers in Iowa and favorability numbers that long paled in comparison to his competitors, like Cruz and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.

In an Aug. 6 post headlined "Donald Trump's Six Stages of Doom," for example, Silver walked through the various traps Trump would face throughout the course of his campaign, which was just beginning to realize its full force.

"History’s lesson isn’t necessarily that Trump’s candidacy will go bust tomorrow, however. There are plenty of examples of fringe or factional candidates who held on to their support for much longer than the month or two that [Herman] Cain and [Michele] Bachmann did. Sometimes, they did well enough in Iowa or New Hampshire, or even won them. Pat Buchanan claimed New Hampshire in 1996, for instance, while Mike Huckabee won Iowa in 2008. Steve Forbes took 30 percent of the Iowa vote in 2000," he wrote at the time.

"There’s some evidence that Trump is over-performing among 'low-information voters.' By November, their ranks will decrease: They’ll either have become more informed, or they’ll be screened out by pollsters because they aren’t likely to vote," Silver wrote at the time, of the second hurdle Trump was to have faced.

Needless to say, their ranks had not decreased by November. But in a Dec. 27 update to the same post, Silver warned that "most difficult hurdles between Donald Trump and the Republican presidential nomination are still to come."

A humbled Silver wrote Thursday, "[If] you, like me, you expected something like this to happen to Trump instead of Cruz, you have to revisit your assumptions."

"Thus, I’m now much less skeptical of Trump’s chances of becoming the nominee," he wrote.