US election winner: Early narrative around results 'fairly dumb', Nate Silver warns

Call for perspective came as many tossup states expected to count slowly

Famed political analyst Nate Silver cautioned early in election night that the state of the race as viewed through Twitter bore little relation to the reality of the votes already counted.

With no tossup states yet called for either candidate but doomy predictions of a Donald Trump win circulating among Democrats, Mr Silver tweeted: "The narrative here fairly dumb overall.

“Trump's in a better position than he was at the start of the night. Biden's not going to win in a landslide. But there's still not a ton we know outside of Florida, and the data we do have is fairly mixed and not necessarily suggestive of as large a polling error elsewhere.”

The hours since the polls began closing have seen many pundits and social media users grow increasingly anxious or enthusiastic that Joe Biden may have fallen short in various critical states – even though many of those outstanding are not expecting to total their votes quickly, with some (including Pennsylvania) anticipating possibly days more of counting.

As Mr Silver mentioned, the early part of the night has focused on Florida, which counted its votes faster even than much smaller states whose polls closed at the same time. The electoral vote-rich state is highly geographically and socially diverse, making it hard to campaign there and even harder to predict a decision.

As the Florida result began to favour Mr Trump while New Hampshire was widely called for Mr Biden, Mr Silver made a similar point by comparing the two states.

“ABC projects New Hampshire for Biden," he wrote, "where he leads by 9 points. A bit smaller than his polling lead (+11) if that's where the state ends up, but not suggestive of the sort of large polling error we seem to see in Florida.”