Polling guru Nate Silver changes his prediction from Trump electoral victory to 'toss-up'
Polling and data guru Nate Silver updated his prediction to "toss-up" two days after he said former President Trump was electorally favored to win the White House in November.
Silver, a prominent elections 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 on Substack that this posed a risk of a "repeat of the popular vote-Electoral College split that cost Democrats the 2000 and 2016 elections." He said Harris is in a better position than President Biden was when he was the incumbent challenger.
But on Thursday, Silver changed his prediction. "The presidential election is a toss-up," his headline on Substack read.
"When we launched the presidential model on June 26 — in the lifetime ago when Joe Biden was the Democratic nominee — the headline in the post that introduced the model was that the election wasn’t a toss-up. Instead, Biden had persistently been behind in the states that were most likely to decide the Electoral College, enough so that he was about a 2:1 underdog in the election despite the uncertainties in the race. His situation wasn’t unrecoverable, or at least it wasn’t until the debate. But you’d rather have had 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, however, it’s far from clear whose position you’d rather be in, and I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to bet either on Harris or on 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. We’re now quite comfortably into that territory."
1 OF THESE 5 DEMOCRATS COULD BE HARRIS' RUNNING MATE
Silver said according to his model, Harris has a 54% chance of winning in Michigan, 50% chance of winning Wisconsin and 47% chance of winning Pennsylvania — all states that would lock down the 270 electoral votes necessary to win.
"As of this afternoon’s model run, Harris’s odds had improved to 44.6 percent, as 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 have ace-king suited, and Republicans have pocket jacks," Silver wrote.
But, he cautioned, "Democrats shouldn’t get too out over their skis about this…there’s one thing I think we can say with some confidence: Democrats are lucky that they’re getting a second chance in this election with Harris instead of Biden."
Silver is notable for successfully predicting 49 of 50 states in the 2008 presidential election. He also predicted President Obama’s 2012 victory.
With the election 96 days away, Silver said polls, while "more stable than they used to be," are still "likely to gyrate back and forth a number of times between now and Nov. 5."
Fox News' Joshua Nelson contributed to this report.