Insuring he does not again look like a blithering idiot, along with the rest of the media and pollsters, as he did on Election Night 2016, New York Times appearing pollster Nate Silver is making sure to double and triple check his analysis this year. As such, he finds that President Trump has a very good chance of reelection. He shared his analysis Sunday on “This Week.”

Silver touted national polling numbers that show Biden has a nine-point advantage over Trump, but Silver said that national polling “doesn’t really matter” since Hillary Clinton isn’t president today. He was alluding to the fact that the candidate must win the electoral college in order to become president like Trump did in 2016. Clinton beat Trump in the popular vote by three million votes if you do not factor in Democrat voter fraud and illegal voting manufactured by Democrat urban political machines. Illegal aliens also likely played a role in that Clinton vote. In fact, due to those factors the GOP has only won the popular vote once, in 2004, since 1992.

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Silver stressed though, “I want to be really clear, Trump can absolutely win reelection. But he definitely has his work cut out for him.” Silver is also careful, as opposed to the vast majority of his colleagues, to keep the ideological bias out of his public analysis.

Silver noted that Clinton had a seven-point lead over Trump at this time in 2016: “So Trump needs to make a comeback. Again, there’s plenty of time for that and maybe also get some help from the electoral college.” The key, as Silver points out, is the electoral college. Many think the president is elected by a majority of the popular vote. But the Constitution didn’t design it that way. If so, states with large populations would control the White House, leaving the great number of smaller states out in the cold. That’s why many Democrats want an end to the electoral college. They know that Democrat-voting large urban centers in states like New York, Illinois, and California would give them the whip hand in any presidential race.

So it doesn’t matter so much how big you win as by where you win. As Hillary Clinton did, a candidate can rack up giant numbers in densely populated states only to have them rendered useless by the electoral college. As President Trump did, a smart campaign chooses its battles with an eye to the magic 270 electoral college number, not to the shiny yet ultimately non-decisive popular vote.

Silver’s even-handed and accurate analysis means that The New York Times and Silver himself are hedging their bets, as they realize that for almost thirty years every incumbent president has been reelected. Many news operations may also be less prone to overwrought liberal claims this time, as they can still taste the egg all over their faces from 2016.