According to well-known election analyst and statistician Nate Silver, there are clear favorites in the 2024 presidential election.
The data experts released their quadrennial model on Wednesday, first predicting that former President Donald Trump has a 65.7% chance of beating President Biden on Nov. 5.
Silver’s current projections, based on 40,000 simulations from his model, project that Biden, 81, is likely to beat Trump, 78, in the national popular vote by 0.1 percentage point (47.2% to 47.1%).
But when it comes to the all-important Electoral College, Silver’s model projects Trump to receive 287 votes, just over the 270 needed to win the White House.
“Frankly, any candidate who thinks Trump has a better chance of winning is not the candidate who wants Biden to win,” Silver said. The company acknowledged this in a blog post outlining its findings. — The headline read: “Presidential election is not a 50-50 contest.”
“If the difference between the Electoral College and the popular vote is similar to what happened in 2016 and 2020, Biden will be in serious trouble if the popular vote is roughly equal,” he added.
The last Republican presidential candidate to win the popular vote was George W. Bush, who was re-elected in 2004.
Silver said the biggest problem facing the incumbent president is that he would need to win all of the same battleground states that Biden swept four years ago.
“[I]”If Biden loses Georgia, Arizona and Nevada and falls far behind in those states, he will need to win all three states – Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania,” he wrote.
“Our simulations predict that Biden will win at least one of these states.[%] However, he managed just three wins in 32 games.[%] It’s the precision of the simulation. It’s the precision you can get with your models that you can’t get with intuition.”
Silver’s predictions put him at odds with FiveThirtyEight, the firm he founded and left last year. the current, Biden has a 51% chance of winning.
Silver rose to national prominence during the 2012 election when he correctly predicted that Barack Obama would be re-elected, despite criticism from conservatives that his analysis was unfavorable to Republican candidate Mitt Romney.
He wrote Wednesday that the 2024 race “will look a lot like the reverse of 2012, when national polls showed it was a close race, but battleground state polls consistently favored Obama and painted a much stronger map.”
Silver issued a stark warning about Biden’s prospects earlier this month and even considered whether to drop out of the race.
Also on Wednesday, the latest Quinnipiac University poll of registered voters showed Trump leading Biden by four points, 49% to 45%.
A poll conducted by the outlet last month gave Biden a one-point lead over the 45th president, 48% to 47%.
In the six-way race, Trump’s lead widened to six points, 43% to 37%. Independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. received 11%, Green Party candidate Jill Stein and independent Cornel West each received 2%, and Libertarian Party candidate Chase Oliver received 1%.
A Quinnipiac University poll found that 55% of voters felt Trump should not go to prison for his conviction in the Manhattan hush money case, while 40% said he should.
The former president’s sentencing is scheduled for July 11.
As for Hunter Biden, 51% believe he should be sentenced to prison for violating federal weapons laws, while 38% believe he should not.
Trump and Biden are scheduled to face off in the first debate of the general election season on Thursday in Atlanta.
Nearly three-quarters of voters (73%) claimed they would watch the show, but few indicated they were willing to be persuaded.
Just 13% of Biden supporters, 12% of Trump supporters and 32% of Kennedy supporters said they were prepared to change their vote after the debate.
The poll was conducted June 20-24 among 1,405 registered voters and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.6 percentage points.
