Less than 48 hours after suggesting former President Trump held an electoral advantage in the upcoming November presidential race, polling and data expert Nate Silver announced that he had revised his election prediction to “toss-up”.
Silver, a popular elections analyst and statistician, dropped his first election model on Tuesday now that Vice President Kamala Harris is the near-certain Democratic nominee. He predicted that Harris would win the popular vote, but called her “a modest underdog to Trump in the Electoral College.”
In a Substack post Monday, Silver noted the potential for a “repeat of the popular vote-Electoral College split that cost Democrats the 2000 and 2016 elections.” He pointed to Harris being an incumbent challenger, which puts her in a much better situation initially than President Biden was.
On Thursday, however, Silver changed his prediction. His new Substack headline read, “The presidential election is a toss-up.”
“When we launched the presidential model on June 26 — in the lifetime ago when Joe Biden was the Democratic nominee — the headline in the post that introduced the model was that the election wasn’t a toss-up. Instead, Biden had persistently been behind in the states that were most likely to decide the Electoral College, enough so that he was about a 2:1 underdog in the election despite the uncertainties in the race. His situation wasn’t unrecoverable, or at least it wasn’t until the debate. But you’d rather have had Donald Trump’s hand to play every day of the week and twice on Sundays,” Silver wrote.
“Now that the election is in Kamala_mode, however, it’s far from clear whose position you’d rather be in, and I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to bet either on Harris or on Trump,” he added.
“At FiveThirtyEight, we actually had a formal definition of a ‘toss-up’, which is an election where each candidate had at least a 40 percent chance of winning. We’re now quite comfortably into that territory.”
Harris is at 54% in Silver’s model of winning Michigan, and at precisely a coin-tossed tie for the other two crucial states that are gateways to reaching his magic number of 270 electoral votes.
“As of this afternoon’s model run, Harris’s odds had improved to 44.6 percent, as compared to 54.9 percent for Trump and a 0.5 percent chance of an Electoral College deadlock. It’s not exactly 50/50, but close enough that a poker player would call it a “flip”: Democrats have ace-king suited, and Republicans have pocket jacks,” Silver wrote.
Still, he cautioned “Democrats shouldn’t get too out over their skis about this…there’s one thing I think we can say with some confidence: Democrats are lucky that they’re getting a second chance in this election with Harris instead of Biden.”
Silver famously predicted 49 of the 50 states correctly in the ’08 presidential election and successfully forecasted President Obama to win re-election in 2012.
The simple answer is that we are 96 days away from the election and the polls are “more stable than they used to be,” are still “likely to gyrate back and forth a number of times between now and Nov. 5.”
