Nate Silver,
founder of the website FiveThirtyEight and
now a writer on his Silver Bulletin Substack, had some bad news for
Kamala Harris Thursday: Donald Trump has pulled ahead in the
presidential race, according to his analysis.
Matt Margolis at our sister site PJ Media had some choice commentary about the newest results:
Did
you hear that scream? Liberals far and wide are no doubt freaking out
right now because the election they thought they had in the bag after
the Democratic Party crowned Kamala Harris as its nominee, which sent a
jolt of enthusiasm in their party, is now slipping away.
Kamala's
honeymoon bounce is now on a downward trajectory, and a slew of
battleground state polling is looking really good for Donald Trump. But
perhaps even more devastating for the Democrats is that Nate Silver's
famous election projection model has Trump ahead for the first time in
weeks.
As you can see, in Silver’s model, Trump is now favored to win the electoral vote and is ahead in many crucial swing states:
More Nate Silver: Nate Silver's First Presidential Election Forecast Is Out, and Democrats Are Losing Their Minds
Nate Silver Drops Truth Bomb on White House for Trying to Hide Biden's Cognitive Decline
As we all know, polls are just polls, and models are just models. Silver has a pretty good track record, however, especially when compared to some of his competitors:
Silver was named one of the world's 100 most influential people by Time
in 2009 after an election forecasting system he developed successfully
predicted the outcomes in forty-nine of the fifty states in the 2008 U.S. presidential election.[4] His subsequent election forecasting systems predicted the outcome of the 2012 and 2020 presidential elections with a high degree of accuracy. His polls-only model gave Donald Trump, the ultimate winner, only a 28.6% chance of victory in the 2016 presidential election,[5] but this was higher than many other forecasting competitors.[6]
On his Substack, Silver explains that although Harris still edges the former president in the overall vote, it’s the electoral college that decides the day:
Harris
is ahead by 3.8 points in our national poll tracker — up from 2.3
points the day before the Democratic Convention began — which does
suggest some sort of convention bounce.
However, she’s fallen to a 47.3 percent chance of winning the Electoral
College versus 52.4 percent for Donald Trump. (The numbers don’t add to
100 because of the possibility of an Electoral College deadlock.)
He
also points out that Kamala’s numbers in Pennsylvania—a crucial swing
state—show signs of danger for the VP. Bet she's reconsidering that
choice not to pick Gov. Josh Shapiro as her running mate:
There’s another, longer-term concern for Harris, though:
it’s been a while since we’ve seen a poll showing her ahead in
Pennsylvania, which is the tipping-point state more than a third of time
in our model. Today, in fact, we added one post-DNC poll
showing Pennsylvania as a tie, and another (conducted during the DNC)
showing either a tie or Trump +1, depending on what version you prefer.
As of this writing, the RCP Polling average
shows Harris up by a statistically insignificant .08 margin in the
Keystone state—but four out of the eight polls cited give Trump the
edge, while another shows a tie. That means that only three of the eight
polls actually indicate Harris is ahead.
Polls are just polls, as
we all know, and if you look around, you can find one somewhere that
supports virtually any conclusion you’re hoping for. Some show Harris
winning the race, others say Trump will win by a big margin. That being
said, with the media going into 24-hour-a-day overdrive trying to sell
us on the Harris/Walz team, it’s a hopeful sign that many Americans
don’t appear to be buying what they’re selling.
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