Nate Silver Warns That Kamala Harris Has One Big Problem

According to Nate Silver, Kamala Harris is "a modest underdog to Trump in the Electoral College, risking a repeat of the popular vote-Electoral College split that cost Democrats the 2000 and 2016 elections."

Joe Biden similarly had a huge Electoral College-popular vote gap in 2020 where his victory hinged on less than 50,000 votes in just a few battleground states. Silver writes that Harris has "a slightly wider popular vote-Electoral College gap than Biden had in his version of the forecast."

Since Harris isn’t president herself, she doesn’t get the same bonus that Biden did. And we think that makes sense. Other things being equal — that is, notwithstanding Biden’s terrible polling against Trump and voter concerns about his age — you wouldn’t want to replace an elected incumbent president who won the same matchup last time with his VP. So whereas Biden was a roughly 2-point favorite in the popular vote in our fundamentals model, it has the Harris-Trump matchup as almost an exact tie in the popular vote. This could shift upward or downward in the remaining days of the election based on the economic data the model collects. 

Silver then explained what his model accounts for:

So basically, the model does this: 

• Take the current polling-based snapshot, which shows Trump ahead by only 0.4 points. 
• Adjust for the convention bounce, which puts Harris very slightly ahead. 
• Regress toward the fundamentals-based prior, which shows a tied popular vote. (The prior currently gets 25 percent of the weight and it will fade to zero by Election Day.) 

That’s how we get to a forecast of Harris winning the popular vote — although by only 0.6 percentage points. 

So where does that leave the election? While she is slightly favored in the national popular vote, she is not favored in the Electoral College. "Instead … drumroll … she has a 38 percent chance, compared to 61 percent for Trump and roughly a 1 point chance of no Electoral College majority because of a 269-269 tie (or RFK Jr. earning some electoral votes)."

Related: Kamala’s Honeymoon May Be Over Already

I think there's one thing that Silver isn't accounting for. At the very least, Kamala's ascension as the presumptive nominee would have a comparable effect on the polls as a convention bounce. We can see it in the RealClearPolitics average.

Trump hits his highest RCP average against Harris. pic.twitter.com/avPyUfKZWY

— Matt Margolis (@mattmargolis) August 1, 2024

There's no doubt that Harris has chipped away at Trump's lead, but that was inevitable. The question is whether she can maintain it or if it is just a bounce that will come down. Either way, as it stands, the election has been effectively reset to where things stood before the debate, albeit with more enthusiasm on the Democrats' side. 

In the end, some of the blue states that became competitive with Biden atop the ticket don't appear to be as competitive now, and we're back to the scenario where Trump has to win just one of the "Blue Wall" states (Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania) and Kamala has to win all three.

“I know people don’t like to talk about that [the Electoral College], because there’s nothing that Democrats can do about it. But the election is likely to be close, and it’s a big disadvantage when the ties go to Republicans,” Silver explained.

On one hand, as long as Trump wins the Electoral College, I couldn't care less if he loses the popular vote. However, if Trump once again makes it into the White House without winning the national popular vote, that will add even more fuel to the fire to the movement to abolish the Electoral College.