Momentum and hype can only take you so many places. If polling guru Nate Silver’s latest forecast is correct, one of them isn’t the White House.
According to the founder of wonk outlet FiveThirtyEight, who now publishes his model on Substack, his latest prediction has Kamala Harris’ odds of taking the presidency down over five points over the past week.
While the race is still a toss-up according to Silver’s model — anything that falls within a 60-40 percentage split qualifies as such, in his rubric — Trump’s 58.2 percent odds on Wednesday, vs. Harris’ 41.6 percent odds, falls within the outer limits of the toss-up range.
That’s down from a 52.4 percent Trump, 47.3 percent Harris model last week.
The culprit, he said, was that Harris’ modest strength in national polls wasn’t matched by her performance in battleground states, and the momentum and hype out of the Democratic National Convention hadn’t produced as much of a bounce as hoped.
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“There’s room to debate the convention bounce stuff, but Harris has been getting a lot of mediocre state polls lately,” Silver wrote, according to Fox News.
Writing on social media, Silver said that there were issues in two of the biggest states Harris needs to carry in order to beat Donald Trump — Pennsylvania and Michigan.
“National polls and polls of other swing states mostly decent for Harris, but erosion in PA/MI hurts a lot in the model,” he wrote Wednesday.
“In MI, the polling average has fallen from Harris +3.1 pre-DNC to Harris +1.9 now.”
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In addition to Pennsylvania, Michigan has become something of an issue for Harris.
National polls and polls of other swing states mostly decent for Harris, but erosion in PA/MI hurts a lot in the model. pic.twitter.com/100ztjzkRq
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) September 4, 2024
Late Thursday, many on social media noted that the model had shifted to a lean-Trump election:
🚨 BREAKING – NATE SILVER ELECTION MODEL raises Trump’s victory chances to 60.1%, PENNSYLVANIA to 61%
ELECTORAL COLLEGE ODDS:
🔴 Trump: 60.1% (+20.4)
🔵 Harris: 39.7%SWING STATES:
🔴 PENNSYLVANIA: Trump 61%
🔴 ARIZONA: Trump 73%
🔴 NORTH CAROLINA: Trump 73%
🔴 GEORGIA: Trump… pic.twitter.com/CL99AkuvVL— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) September 5, 2024
Silver said that while he thought the day itself was decent for Harris, “she was hurt by this series of polls from a Democratic group that showed her exactly tied with Trump in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
“Our polling averages apply a relatively harsh ‘house effects’ adjustment to partisan-sponsored polls, so it interprets ties in partisan polls as losing. And PA/MI/WI polls are really important to the forecast.
“But we’re now finally starting to get some post-Labor Day polls, which look decent for Harris, and those will be subject to less of a convention bounce adjustment than polls that went into the field immediately after the DNC. So we’ll see what the several days bring.”
“National polls look decent-to-good for Harris, but the probability of an Electoral College/popular vote split is up to almost 20%,” he added.
National polls look decent-to-good for Harris, but the probability of an Electoral College/popular vote split is up to almost 20%.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) September 5, 2024
In fact, because of the fact that the two largest states in the country are blue — California and New York — and also get voters out to the polls for other races and ballot issues, a popular/electoral vote split, particularly with Donald Trump as the nominee, is highly likely in any GOP win.
Kamala’s relative weakness in national polling aggregates compared to both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden at similar junctures in the 2016 and 2020 races, respectively, has been a warning sign to anyone who thought that “vibes” and “joy” were continuing unabated in camp Kamala.
Yes, she has a better chance of winning than Joe Biden did. So would most banana slugs, were they eligible for ballot access.
Her ascent has stalled, and a softball interview with CNN that still didn’t go so hot hasn’t helped, either. That leaves the debates and the homestretch of campaigning — two areas where Kamala can’t just hide behind choreographed rallies.
If you wanted to win and had to be in one candidate’s shoes, both subjectively and objectively, it would have to be Trump’s at this point.
