‘BIG PROBLEM’: Election Forecaster Nate Silver Crushes Kamala’s Hopes

Pollster Nate Silver has relaunched his election forecast model and according to the latest reading, there’s some news that should make Democrats shout for joy and other data that casts a shroud of doubt on the campaign of Kamala Harris.

It looks as if the Vice President is in a slightly better position as the party nominee against former President Donald Trump than Joe Biden, who was only forecast to have a 27 percent chance of winning when he left the race, which Silver believes was being generous due to the fact the president wasn’t cognitively able to even run a normal presidential campaign. But Silver also noted a “big problem” for the Democrats’ chances with less than 100 days to go.

Silver went on to write in his Silver Bulletin newsletter that having Harris as the nominee gives the Democratic Party a fighting chance against Trump, especially since she’s currently a slight favorite over the former president in the popular vote, which the Democrats have managed to win in almost every single election since 2000. He then noted that, if the election were held today, there would be a lot of uncertainty about who would come out victorious. This is the byproduct of polling in several critical Blue Wall states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, as it’s been a close race ever since Biden said “adios” to his reelection efforts.

“However, she’s 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. 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,” Silver wrote in his article.

Silver then walks us through how his model for election prediction works. He kicks off his explanation by telling readers that the model begins by making a “snapshot” of the current state of the presidential race that is based on polls on both the state and national levels. While state polls, he says, are far more important to the logic of the model, there are fewer available than national polls since Biden exited stage right, so the use of national polls is a better starting place.

As of now, Harris is behind Trump, but only by a tiny 0.4 percent in the national average, which is way closer than the president ever was at any point since Silver started up the model back in June. She’s also pulling in around 44.1 percent of the vote, which is substantially higher than Biden, who was floating in between 40 and 41 percent. With Trump vs. Harris, there are fewer folks who are shunning both parties, a fact made clear by the declining number of both third-party and undecided voters.

“As you can see, the polling average — which we’ve retroactively calculated back to July 1 — has been bouncing around a lot. That’s partly because of all of the crazy political news, and partly because we decided only to use polls conducted fully since the Biden-Trump debate on June 27, the moment at which Biden’s campaign entered a downward spiral and Harris’s candidacy went from a weird hypothetical to highly plausible. It’s also because of sample size: there wasn’t a lot of high-quality polling testing the Harris-Trump matchup until recently. However, we can pretty clearly see that Harris’s numbers have improved since Biden exited the race and she became the presumptive Democratic nominee,” Silver concluded his report.