CV NEWS FEED // The latest 2024 election forecast by renowned statistician Nate Silver determined that former President Donald Trump has a six-in-ten chance of winning back the White House in November.
Silver determined Trump has about a 60% probability of winning the presidency, despite the fact that Vice President Kamala Harris has been consistently leading in recent national polls.
The polling expert pointed out that he gave the former president the slight advantage due to Trump lately gaining ground in a host of battleground states – particularly in the “blue wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
“Silver’s forecast model gives Trump a 60.1 percent chance of winning the Electoral College, compared to Vice President Kamala Harris’ 39.7 percent, with the former president taking 277 electoral votes to the vice president’s 260,” Newsweek reported Friday.
Due to rules laid out in the U.S. Constitution, the candidate who wins a majority of the Electoral College votes always becomes the president-elect, regardless of who wins the popular vote.
“The latest prediction gives Trump his highest chance of winning since July 30,” Newsweek’s report added. “The model also shows that the Republicans have made a net gain of between 0.1 and 2 points in every swing state other than Georgia and Wisconsin in the past week.”
In a post to his Substack on Friday, Silver called the Electoral College “the elephant in the room.” He noted that the centuries-old method of electing American presidents, devised by the Framers of the Constitution, “is starting to look like a challenge for Kamala Harris.”
The Electoral College “was a problem for Democrats in 2016, of course, and also in 2020 — when Joe Biden won the popular vote by 4.5 points, but the tipping-point state, Wisconsin, went for Biden by only 0.6 points,” Silver added.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton won a plurality of the popular vote, with 48.2% to Trump’s 46.1%. However, Trump still won the election to become the country’s 45th President, due to winning the Electoral College, buoyed by narrowly edging out Clinton in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
In an earlier Substack post published Thursday, Silver and co-author Eli McKown-Dawson explained that Harris’ probability of winning was undermined by a “series of polls from a Democratic group that showed her exactly tied with Trump in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.”
>> RECENT POLLS: TRUMP CLOSING THE GAP WITH HARRIS IN MICHIGAN, PENNSYLVANIA, WISCONSIN <<
In 2000, Democratic nominee Al Gore won a plurality of the popular vote but lost the election to Republican George W. Bush – who had won a slight majority of the electoral vote.
Silver wrote on X (formerly Twitter) Thursday afternoon: “National polls look decent-to-good for Harris, but the probability of an Electoral College/popular vote split is up to almost 20%.”
Therefore, according to the expert, there is about a one-in-five chance that the candidate who wins the popular vote in 2024 still loses the election.
In his Friday Substack post, Silver indicated that “Harris is ahead by 3.0 points nationally, a tick better than the 2.3-point lead she had coming into” the Democratic National Convention last month.
Conventional wisdom about modern American partisan politics holds that major party nominees usually experience a temporary “bounce” of support following their party’s national convention in the summer.
Silver wrote in a post to X Friday morning that he is “not super sympathetic to complaints about the convention bounce stuff,” as Harris is losing support in many key state polls despite her national lead having slightly risen.
“Harris is in fact on the decline in polls over the past couple of weeks in most of the key swing states,” he emphasized.
Harris’ national polling “lead peaked at 4.3 points on August 23 in our last model run before Robert F. Kennedy dropped out,” Silver further noted on Substack.
Kennedy, an independent candidate and previously a Democratic primary candidate, exited the race and endorsed Trump two weeks ago. He immediately announced his intention to remove his name from the ballot in all closely-contested battleground states.
Since Kennedy’s withdrawal, multiple battleground state Democratic officials, such as Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, have fought to keep his name on the November ballot.
However, appeals courts on Friday ruled in favor of Kennedy in Michigan and North Carolina, holding that Kennedy’s name should be removed from the ballot.
In Michigan, “Benson plans to appeal immediately,” NBC News noted.
Silver is the founder of the polling aggregation and analysis website FiveThirtyEight, which he left last year.
The statistician has a reputation as a well-respected political forecaster going back more than a decade.
Silver became a household name – particularly on the political left – following the 2012 presidential election, when his forecast correctly predicted then-President Barack Obama’s reelection, down to the result of every swing state.
The day after the election, the left-wing publication The Guardian deemed Silver the “big winner of US election night,” calling him a “statistical guru.”
The Guardian’s November 2012 article noted that Silver, then with the New York Times,
infuriated Republicans in the closing days of the race by arguing on his blog FiveThirtyEight.com that Obama’s chances of winning were steadily increasing. His final forecast gave Obama a 90.9% chance of victory. Silver also forecast 332 electoral college votes for Obama against 206 for Romney – the actual result.
>> SILVER: ELECTORAL COLLEGE DOES NOT FAVOR HARRIS <<
In 2016, Silver, like almost all political forecasters, overestimated Clinton’s chances, predicting that the failed Democratic candidate had a 71.4% chance of winning compared to Trump’s 28.6%.
On Thursday night, the Harris-Walz campaign responded to Silver’s latest forecast via a fundraising email sent to supporters.
“It’s clear: We are the underdogs,” the Democratic ticket’s campaign wrote.
The Harris-Walz camp added that it is “confident we can overcome the odds and defeat Donald Trump — but only if we make sustained investments across each of the battleground states.”
FOX News reported:
Last month, Silver predicted that Harris was slightly favored to win the presidential election if it were held then, but cautioned the public against relying too much on polls, citing their record of getting it “wrong” when it comes to former President Trump.
Silver had said at the time that “the polls have been wrong before. In both the last two general elections they underestimated Trump.”
