One of the nation’s top pollsters has updated his election forecast model showing former President Donald Trump’s high probability of victory against Vice President Kamala Harris, but it doesn’t come as particularly good news for Democrats.
Nate Silver, of FiveThirtyEight, published the first updated model in a newsletter Tuesday.
The model showed that Harris has a lot of work to do if she wants to take the White House in November, placing her chances of winning at a paltry 38.1 percent — double digits below Trump’s own chances of winning.
Silver’s forecast showed Trump had a 61.3 percent chance of victory.
Highlighting the constant state of change, Silver updated his model again on Wednesday.
The new findings give Harris a “big uptick,” with a 4.4 percent boost over the forecast released earlier in the week. While the gap has slightly closed, the vice president still has a large deficit to reverse before November.
Big uptick for Harris today on quite a bit of new polling.https://t.co/vsGVG189Sa pic.twitter.com/8GhbRR4559
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) July 31, 2024
The news isn’t all bad for Harris — at least she’s doing better than her boss.
Will Harris become the Democratic nominee?
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Previous forecast models of Silver’s predicted President Joe Biden only had a 26.9 percent chance of beating Trump in the upcoming election, according to Newsweek.
While the updated model still has Trump as the likely favorite, the margin appears to be much slimmer on a granular level.
The popular vote, though virtually useless in a contest decided by the Electoral College, is predicted to go to Harris. Trump is predicted as having only a 46.5 percent chance to sweep this vote.
In the national polls, Harris is only a few fractions of a percentage point away from Trump.
But as Nate Silver noted, Harris has one major problem: “It’s the Electoral College.”
What is decided by these hundreds of electors is, ultimately, the vote that decides who holds the most powerful office in the world.
Democrats are not stuck with Harris, and continued bad polling may force them to reconsider.
Harris is the presumptive Democratic nominee, but her candidacy is not officially locked in yet. Although she has no official challengers from within the party, there are plenty of potential candidates who would leap at the chance at power.
What she brings to the table for Democrats’ 2024 ambitions may simply not be enough to keep her at the top of the party’s ticket.
