Despite the dramatic moves and apparent momentum the Democrats have made to recapture the presidency, prominent election analyst and statistician Nate Silver still sees former President Donald Trump as the front-runner.
His election prediction model Trump has a 61.3% chance of winning the Electoral College vote, while Vice President Kamala Harris has 38.1%.
When he released his model last month, Silver predicted a 65.7% chance of Trump beating President Biden.
In his latest assessment, Silver included numerous polling averages that gave Trump slight advantages nationally and in most battleground states, except for Wisconsin, where Harris held a lead.
Still, Silver’s analysis shows Harris catching up quickly with Trump in most polls, and his model projects a 53.5% chance of her winning the popular vote, compared with Trump’s 46.5% chance.
Last month, his assessment, based on 40,000 simulations run by his model, estimated that Biden had a 47.2% chance of narrowly beating Trump (47.1%) in the national popular vote.
The last Republican presidential candidate to win the popular vote was George W. Bush, who was re-elected in 2004.
Mr. Silver touted his model as a “direct descendant” of FiveThirtyEight’s election forecasts, named after the 538 Electoral College votes. Mr. Silver founded the firm before leaving the company last year.
FiveThirtyEight was one of the few election forecasters to predict that Biden was likely to win the 2024 presidential election. The prediction was discontinued After Biden abruptly dropped out of the race on July 21st.
Biden quickly endorsed Harris, making her a likely candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination and upending the 2024 race.
Harris’s favorability ratings have soared in a series of polls, and her recently rebranded presidential campaign touted raising nearly $200 million less than a week after Biden dropped out.
Primary polls have shown the race remaining largely close, but with less than 100 days until election night, pollsters are rushing to recalibrate to new dynamics in the race.
Trump holds a 2 percentage point lead nationally. Latest RealClearPolitics The poll tally is still somewhat low in battleground state polls compared with the multitude of surveys assessing the Trump-Biden matchup.
“Broadly speaking, the Harris campaign’s strategy is to triangulate the strategies of Hillary in 2016, the Harris primary in 2020, and Biden in 2024, and then do the exact opposite,” Silver joked on X.
Silver was among those publicly urging Biden to resign amid concerns about his mental health.
He rose to fame when he predicted the outcomes of 49 of the 50 states in the 2008 presidential election, and even more so when he predicted President Barack Obama’s victory in 2012.
In 2016, his model predicted that Hillary Clinton would beat Trump, but its latest forecast for 2020 gives Biden an 89% chance of winning.
Harris is now in the process of selecting her running mate as Democrats approach the virtual roll call they plan to hold to select their nominee.
After the virtual roll call, Democrats will hold their national convention in Chicago from Aug. 19-22.
