I totally get Nate Silver's "gut." It's the word I use to describe my first step in college tackle football betting. It's a "feel", apart from reasoning. Like the director of acquisitions at the MET goes down to the basement as a piece is being delivered. With back to delivery, he wheels around suddenly when the piece has been off-loaded and is on the ground. An instantaneous reaction to the visual impression that the piece makes as a whole in one look.
However but. That's not what Silver or I do. We don't just see a blue dot and a red dot on a graph and make a judgment. We see the entire context: hundreds of polls, a trend line of where the dots have been, and an empty trend line to Election Day. We know how many days there are to D-Day. We see not one set of dots but fifty, a set for each state. We are mindful that those fifty sets of dots make the decision, not the one set for the nation as a whole. We read what other people say. In a word, reasoning determines what our gut "feels". It's really our brains.
There is another sense in which gut applies. Yesterday, I made the reasoned gut decision that the race was over, that trumpie would win the presidency. Even as an idiot blogger I feel the responsibility to write what I sincerely think. Nate Silver is done forecasting this election! He will not make the call aside from what his "gut" says and that it is a "50-50 race". That shows no guts.