Vice President Kamala Harris got more bad news regarding her performance in the critical battleground states. Renowned statistician and founder of the polling site FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver, announced his latest prediction that Trump could win all of the swing states, spelling victory for former President Donald Trump.
According to the latest data from Silver, Trump has over a 24% chance of winning all seven swing states next month, the most likely scenario. In contrast, Silver’s analysis found that Vice President Harris has a 15.6% chance of winning all the swing states. The statistician also laid out a number of different swing state scenarios that would provide differing outcomes for the two candidates.
Furthermore, FIveThirtyEight has updated its prediction of the 2024 Presidential Election Outcome, forecasting a 53% chance of Trump winning and a 47% chance of Harris taking the presidency. Silver also wrote in the New York Times recently that his “gut” tells him that Trump will win the election.
“So OK, I’ll tell you,” he said. “My gut says Donald Trump. And my guess is that it is true for many anxious Democrats.” Silver further explained that some polling is inaccurate because pollsters are not reaching out to Trump supporters enough, creating a nonresponse bias in the data.
“Nonresponse bias can be a hard problem to solve,” he wrote. “Response rates to even the best telephone polls are in the single digits — in some sense, the people who choose to respond to polls are unusual. Trump supporters often have lower civic engagement and social trust, so they can be less inclined to complete a survey from a news organization.
Silver added, “Pollsters are attempting to correct for this problem with increasingly aggressive data-massaging techniques, like weighing by educational attainment (college-educated voters are more likely to respond to surveys) or even by how people say they voted in the past. There’s no guarantee any of this will work.”
However, Silver noted that the Harris-Walz campaign still has a chance at the election. “A surprise in polling that underestimates Ms. Harris isn’t necessarily less likely than one for Mr. Trump. On average, polls miss by three or four points. If Ms. Harris does that, she will win by the largest margin in both the popular vote and the Electoral College since Mr. Obama in 2008,” he said.
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Regardless, the pollster explained that substantial data is showing Trump with the high ground. “There are now three recent high-quality national polls that show Donald Trump leading — a difficult circumstance for Harris, given Democrats’ Electoral College disadvantage — and her edge in our national polling average is down to 1.7 points.”
The American Tribune reported on other comments from Silver, where he had Vice President Kamala Harris losing substantial portions of her once-solid lead. “The forecast is really close. After another day of polls showing an essentially tied race in the Midwestern battlegrounds, it’s now literally 50/50,” he said.
He continued, “We’re just not seeing as many Harris +3 type numbers in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania as we did immediately after the debate. It hasn’t been a huge swing, but even a half point to a point makes a difference.” Watch CNN data analyst Harry Enten highlight the change in momentum below: