Photo: Getty Images
Famed polling expert Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight has changed his prediction for the 2024 presidential election.
Silver, who previously pegged former President Donald Trump as a heavy favorite over President Joe Biden and still believed Trump was electorally favored to win in an updated prediction including Vice President Kamala Harris, the new presumptive Democratic candidate, on Tuesday (July 30), changed his prediction to a "toss up" on Thursday (July 31).
“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," Silver wrote on Substack. "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."
“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.”
Silver noted that Harris had a 54% chance of winning in Michigan, a 50% chance of winning Wisconsin and a 47% chance of winning Pennsylvania, all swing states crucial to getting the necessary 270 electoral votes to be elected.
“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.
Harris currently has a 1.5% FiveThirtyEight's estimated average of national polls for the 2024 presidential election. Silver gained notoriety for successfully predicting 49 of 50 states in the 2008 presidential election, as well as former President Barack Obama's re-election win in 2012 and Biden's win in the 2020 election.
The pollster was, however, criticized for giving Hillary Clinton a 71.4% chance of winning over Trump after the former president 304 electoral college votes to win the election.
"I think people shouldn’t have been so surprised," Silver told the Harvard Gazette in 2017. "Clinton was the favorite, but the polls showed, in our view, particularly at the end, a highly competitive race in the Electoral College. We had him with a 30 percent chance, and that’s a pretty likely occurrence. Why did people think it was much less than that? I think there are a few things."