If you’re following this election like a hawk, drowning yourself in polls and forecasts and whipping up Electoral College maps to work out various scenarios, you probably know that Kamala Harris still has a slight lead in national polling. But according to pollster Nate Silver, Trump is, as of today, still favored to win.
How is that possible? The main reason is that there’s a difference between the polling averages we see and the forecast of the actual November results. Predicting the outcome of an election is hard. Polls do give us some insight, but polling is very, very far from perfect.
Silver explains that polling averages merely provide a snapshot of the current state of the race. Meanwhile, his forecast attempts to predict the final outcome in November. The forecast currently shows Kamala Harris as slightly trailing Donald Trump in the Electoral College probability, with Trump at about 55.8 percent and Harris at 44 percent. Despite Trump’s nearly 12-point advantage in the model, this doesn’t indicate a landslide victory for Trump but rather a close, highly uncertain race.
Perhaps the most bizarre thing about Silver's forecast is that Kamala’s odds dropped slightly after the Democratic National Convention. She went from a 55/45 favorite to now a 44/56 underdog.
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So, what happened? First, Harris’s convention “bounce” was underwhelming, with her polling only marginally better than before the convention — she went from a 2.3-point lead to a 3.5-point lead in the national average. “The model’s baseline expectation was a bounce of more like 2 points,” Silver explains. “By the model’s logic, she’s gone from a lead of 2.3 points to a convention-bounce adjusted lead of 1.5 points.”
Second, the model suggests that RFK Jr.’s decision to drop out of the race and endorse Trump might have negated any potential gains Harris would have seen from the convention.
But perhaps the most significant factor in Trump’s advantage in Silver’s model is Harris’s weak performance in Pennsylvania — a must-win state — which has also affected her forecast more than her overall popular vote performance.
Silver concedes that this election is extremely difficult to forecast because "there hasn’t really been a slow news cycle since the debate on June 28."
In rapid succession, we had: the debate, an incredible pressure campaign by Democrats to get Biden to drop out, the assassination attempt against Trump, Trump naming JD Vance as his running mate, the Republican convention, Biden dropping out, Harris securing the nomination overnight, Harris naming Tim Walz as her running mate, the Democratic convention, and then Kennedy dropping out.
Silver's model attempts to account for such scenarios, but it's still extremely difficult this year to understand what is "normal" and what is "crazy." He believes we may know better in a week or so — but then we have the debate. If Harris even bothers to show up.
One thing for sure is that Kamala's bounce in the polls is fading. According to Nate Silver's tracking, national and state polling is almost all trending back toward Trump.
Don't take anything for granted because there's a lot of work left to be done.
