Even after Democrats dramatically moved to re-top their presidential ticket and got an apparent jolt of momentum, famed election analyst and statistical guru Nate Silver still deems former President Donald Trump the favorite.
His election forecast model gives Trump a 61.3% chance of prevailing in the Electoral College, while Vice President Kamala Harris is at 38.1%.
Silver previously pegged Trump with a 65.7% chance of victory over President Biden during his model rollout last month.
In his most recent assessment, Silver included a slew of polling averages that gave Trump slight advantages nationally and in most of the battleground states, albeit not in Wisconsin, where Harris was ahead.
Still, Silver’s analysis showed Harris rapidly gaining ground on Trump in most polling. His model also gave Harris a 53.5% chance of winning the popular vote compared to Trump’s 46.5% chance.
Last month, his assessment, which was based on 40,000 simulations run through the model, pegged Biden with a 47.2% chance of edging out Trump (47.1%) with the national popular vote.
The last Republican presidential candidate to win the popular vote was George W. Bush when he secured re-election in 2004.
Silver touted his model as a “direct descendent” of the FiveThirtyEight election forecast. Silver founded FiveThirtyEight, which is named after the 538 votes available in the Electoral College, and departed from it last year.
FiveThirtyEight had been one of the rare election forecasts that projected Biden was most likely to emerge victorious in the 2024 presidential election. It suspended its forecast after Biden abruptly dropped out of the race on July 21.
Biden promptly endorsed Harris who quickly became the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, scrambling the 2024 contest.
Harris’ favorability ratings in a flurry of polls quickly shot upward and the recently rebranded Harris for President campaign touted a roughly $200 million haul within less than a week of Biden’s exit.
Preliminary polling has generally shown tightening in the race, but less than 100 days out from election night, pollsters are racing to recalibrate for the new dynamics of the contest.
Trump retains a two percentage point edge nationally in the latest RealClearPolitics aggregate of polls, but battleground state polling is still somewhat light compared to the litany of surveys scoring a Trump v. Biden matchup.
“Roughly speaking, the strategy of the Harris campaign should be to triangulate the strategy of Hillary 2016, the Harris 2020 primary campaign, and Biden 2024, and do the exact opposite,” Silver quipped on X.
Silver had been among the chorus of voices publicly encouraging Biden to step aside amid concerns about his mental acuity.
He gained notoriety after successfully predicting 49 of 50 states in the 2008 presidential election and was further vaulted to prominence by his prediction of President Barack Obama’s 2012 victory.
Back in 2016, his model favored Hillary Clinton to prevail against Trump, but in 2020, his last forecast gave Biden an 89% chance of victory.
Harris is now rushing to select a running mate as the Democrats’ planned virtual roll call to coronate their nominee is fast approaching.
Following the virtual roll call, Democrats will then hold their national convention in Chicago from Aug. 19-22.