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From Fox News: 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,” Silver wrote Thursday.
However, he added, “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.”
“It’s also a toss-up in the states that are most likely to decide the election,” Silver explained. He listed the battleground states that may just decide the entire election:
Harris has a 54 percent chance of winning Michigan, a 50 percent chance of winning Wisconsin and 47 percent chance of winning Pennsylvania, states that would suffice to net her 270 electoral votes, one more than she needs to win (assuming she also holds lean-blue states like New Hampshire). She also has a 40 percent chance of winning Nevada, where her polling has been much better than Biden’s so far, and roughly a one-in-three chance in Georgia and North Carolina, which gives her some backup options that Biden lacked.
Really pressed for time today, but wrote up a little thing on the state of the race.https://t.co/zZoq36hlrj
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) August 1, 2024
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