CV NEWS FEED// Statistics expert Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin election model reports that despite Harris’s improvement in the popular vote compared to Biden, the Electoral College does not favor her.
Trump is slightly more favored by the Electoral College, and Silver explained that it may result in “a repeat of the popular vote-Electoral College split that cost Democrats the 2000 and 2016 elections.”
He added that,
Biden also had a large Electoral College-popular vote gap in 2020, barely winning several tipping-point states despite winning the popular vote by 4.5 percentage points. But this is still a problem for Democrats, and we show Harris as having a slightly wider popular vote-Electoral College gap than Biden had in his version of the forecast.
Silver specified that Harris trails Trump by 0.4%, with Trump at 44.5% of the popular vote and Harris at 44.1%. In comparison, before Biden dropped out of the race, he had between 40-41% of the popular vote.
Silver elaborated that if an election were held on the day of the article’s publication, July 30, the outcome would be uncertain, “both because the polling in the pivotal Blue Wall states (Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin) has been close since Biden dropped out of the race and because there’s some intrinsic uncertainty about where the race stands given how much news there’s been lately.”
The Silver Bulletin model is based on state and national polls, and though Silver stated that state polls “are ultimately more important in the model’s logic, they’ve been less plentiful than national polls since Biden dropped out.” Thus Silver focused on national polls in deliberating Trump’s lead on Harris.
