I Ran 80,000 Simulations

About

I Ran 80,000 Simulations is a phrasal template used to mock election forecaster Nate Silver's final update before the 2024 United States Presidential Election, which resulted in a near-40,000/40,000 split between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. The perceived uselessness of the "prediction" was widely mocked online, resulting in a snowclone meme about running 80,000 simulations, typically using the template "I just ran 80,000 simulations and X."

Origin

On November 5th, 2024, Nate Silver released his final update on the state of the 2024 United States Presidential Election.^[1] In the update, he reported he ran the election through his statistical analysis model 80,000 times. Kamala Harris won 40,012 of those times and Trump won 39,718 (with the remaining 270 times resulting in an Electoral College tie). In essence, the final update from Silver was that the election was that each candidate had roughly a 50 percent chance to with the election.

Spread

The update was widely mocked by Nate Silver's critics after it was posted, as they felt that Silver's "pure toss-up" final forecast did not live up to his reputation as an election oracle.

For example, on November 5th, 2024, Twitter / X user @TimHwang^[2] joked, "all of nate silver’s exquisite statistical machinery churning and churning to produce a dead on uncertain prediction is genuinely poetic and cosmically funny – like the end of a borges story," gaining over 200 retweets and 2,900 likes in one day.

I Ran 80,000 Simulations

Nate Silver's final update also led to parodies in the form of a snowclone meme, often beginning with "I Ran 80,000 Simulations" or a similar variant.

For example, on November 5th, 2024, Twitter user @eastvillageguy^[3] tweeted, "I just ran 80,000 simulations and you got no bitches in any of them," gaining over 150 retweets and 3,100 likes in less than one day.

On the same day, Twitter user @joshcarlosjosh^[4] used the phrasal template in a Lord of the Rings joke, gaining over 100 retweets and 1,800 likes in the same timeframe.

Various Examples

Search Interest

Unavailable.

External References