Electoral College Model Forecasts Donald Trump Heavily Favored to Defeat Kamala Harris Shealah Craighead, Lawrence Jackson/White House Photos

So much for the establishment media’s overhype of Democrat presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris: a scientific model published on Tuesday demonstrates that GOP nominee for president former President Donald Trump is heavily favored to win the election.

Statistician Nate Silver’s model, which pulls together polls and other data to forecast the probabilities of which candidate will win in November, opens the new race between Trump and Harris with an aggressive prediction of a likely Trump victory. Trump is forecast to have a 61.3-percent chance of winning, while Harris only has a 38.1-percent chance of winning. That means Trump has a more than three-in-five shot at victory, while Harris has a less than two-in-five shot. This is terrible news for desperate Democrats who were hoping switching their candidate at the top of the ticket would dramatically change the trajectory of the race.

For what it’s worth, as Silver points out, his forecast tracks very closely with prediction markets where people literally bet real money on what they think the outcome will be:

Once again, our forecast came in eerily close to prediction markets! (Harris 38% Silver Bulletin vs 39% Polymarket).

For further detail, please subscribe—this was a lot of work!

One further post on methodology coming later today or tomorrow, but it's basically the same model.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) July 30, 2024

Silver had turned his model off when Democrat President Joe Biden dropped out of the race a little over a week ago to give it time to collect refreshed data on the new contest between Trump and Harris. In the previous model Trump was  crushing Biden, who had dropped well below a 30-percent shot of winning. While Harris does improve upon Biden’s position at his worst before he dropped out, she does not seriously change the direction of this race—and Trump clearly is still the favorite.

In fact, while Silver’s analysis expects Harris is actually a slight favorite over Trump when it comes to the popular vote, when it comes to the electoral college Trump has a much more serious edge over her. What’s more, Silver’s analysis does also expect Harris will do worse in the electoral college as compared against her popular vote performance than even Biden did, so things could be headed for a very bad trajectory for Democrats from here, depending on how the race breaks on certain fronts.

While Silver writes that Harris “will give Democrats a fighting chance,” and is “a slight favorite over Donald Trump in the popular vote, which Democrats have won in all but one election since 2000,” Harris is “a modest underdog to Trump in the Electoral College, risking a repeat of the popular vote-Electoral College split that cost Democrats the 2000 and 2016 elections.”

“Harris isn’t unique in this regard: Biden also had a large Electoral College-popular vote gap in 2020, barely winning several tipping-point states despite winning the popular vote by 4.5 percentage points,” Silver writes. “But this is still a problem for Democrats, and we show Harris as having a slightly wider popular vote-Electoral College gap than Biden had in his version of the forecast.”

Later in his post, Silver specifically breaks down each candidate’s chances in each state and Trump is favored—sometimes heavily—across all the battleground states. In Georgia, North Carolina, and Arizona, for instance, Silver’s model gives Trump a more than 70 percent chance of winning each. In Michigan and Pennsylvania, Silver’s model estimates Trump’s chances of winning each state at more than 57 percent each—while Wisconsin becomes the closest battleground state, where Silver’s model gives Trump a nearly 53 percent shot of winning. Trump is also favored, by more than 65 percent, to win Nevada.

Silver’s fuller analysis, available on his Substack, is worth reading. But if these numbers prove to be accurate as more data and information come in from each state, the picture will become clearer — Democrats are in serious trouble even after the switch to Harris from Biden.

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