Polling guru Nate Silver changes his prediction from Trump’s electoral victory to a “toss”

Pollster and data guru Nate Silver updated his forecast to “upside” two days after saying former President Trump was electorally favored to win the White House in November.

Silver, a prominent election 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 in Substack that this posed a risk of “a repeat of the popular vote-Electoral College divide that cost Democrats the 2000 and 2016 elections.” He said Harris is in a better position than President Biden was when he was the current challenger.

But on Thursday, Silver changed his prediction. “Presidential election is a toss-up,” read his Substack headline.

“When we launched the presidential model on June 26 – in the life before when Joe Biden was the Democratic nominee – the headline of the post that introduced the model was that the election was not a swing. Instead, Biden had staunchly trailed in states most likely to decide the Electoral College, so much so that he was a 2:1 underdog in the election despite the uncertainties in the race. His situation was not irretrievable, or at least it was not until the debate. But you’d rather have 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, though, it’s not clear who you’d rather be in, and I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to bet on either Harris or 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. Now we are quite calm in that territory.”

Silver said that according to his model, Harris has a 54% chance of winning Michigan, a 50% chance of winning Wisconsin and a 47% chance of winning Pennsylvania, all states that would close the 270 electoral votes needed to won.

“In this afternoon’s model run, Harris’ chances had improved to 44.6 percent, 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 suit ace-king, and Republicans have pocket jacks,” Silver wrote.

But, he cautioned, “Democrats shouldn’t get too worked up about this…there’s one thing I think we can say with some confidence: Democrats are lucky to be getting a second chance in this election with Harris instead of Biden.”

Silver is notable for successfully predicting 49 of the 50 states in the 2008 presidential election. He also predicted President Obama’s victory in 2012.

With the election still 96 days away, Silver said the polls, while “more stable than before,” are still “likely to swing back and forth a few times between now and November 5.”