Renowned pollster and numbers guy Nate Silver just released some shocking, new data about the upcoming presidential election.
And it spells bad news for Kamala Harris.
Despite Harris’ bump in overall favorability since launching her campaign, Silver’s numbers and election model still show former president Donald Trump as the favorite to win the election.
According to a pre-Labor Day projection reported by The Hill, Silver’s election forecast now has Trump slightly ahead of Harris.
While Harris is beating the former president by 3.8 points based on the updated Silver Bulletin’s national polling tracker, the vice president’s chance of winning the Electoral College has dipped.
As we know, the Electoral College is the measure needed to win the presidency.
Silver’s forecast has Trump with a 52.4 percent chance of winning the Electoral College, about 5 points higher than Harris’s 47.3 percent.
“Some of this is because of the convention bounce adjustment that the model applies to polls that were conducted during or after the [Democratic National Convention],” Silver wrote last Thursday. “It assumes Harris’s polls are somewhat inflated right now, in other words — just as it assumed Trump’s numbers were inflated after the [Republican National Convention].”
Since Harris replaced President Biden as the party’s presidential nominee, Harris has closed the polling gap with the former president, erasing the lead Trump had while he campaigned against Biden.
However, The Hill reported that a new survey from Emerson College Polling found that Trump and Harris are essentially tied in each of the battleground states.
Silver did also note that if Harris is able to maintain her current standing for a “couple” more weeks, “she’ll begin to track up again in our forecast as the model will become more confident that she’s out of the convention bounce period.”
Based on the outcome of the 2020 election, Harris will likely need to win the national popular vote by at least 3 points to be guaranteed the necessary electoral votes to win the presidency.
However, Silver did point out that Harris does have a potential roadblock ahead of her that favors Trump — Pennsylvania.
“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,” said Silver.
However, even if Harris does level off of the post-DNC “bump”, in both 2016 and 2020, Trump ended up vastly overperforming his public polling numbers.