Polling guru Nate Silver changes his prediction from Trump electoral victory to 'toss-up'
Statistician previously predicted Kamala winning popular vote, but falling short in the Electoral College
By Yael Halon Fox News
Published August 2, 2024 6:00am EDT
Polling and data guru Nate Silver updated his prediction to "toss up" two days after he said former President Trump was electorally favored to win the White House in November.
Silver, a prominent elections analyst and statistician, released his first election model since Vice President Kamala Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee on Tuesday. He predicted Harris would win the popular vote, but called her "a modest underdog to Trump in the Electoral College."
Silver wrote on Substack that this posed a risk of a "repeat of the popular vote-Electoral College split that cost Democrats the 2000 and 2016 elections." He said Harris is in a better position than President Biden was when he was the incumbent challenger.
But on Thursday, Silver changed his prediction. "The presidential election is a toss-up," his headline on Substack read.
"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."
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