Elections analyst and FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver believes that former President and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is the slight favorite to defeat Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris this November going into Labor Day weekend and the home stretch of the campaign.
The model update suggests that Trump has a 52.4% chance of winning the Electoral College while Harris has a 47.3% chance of prevailing, making Trump the favorite in Silver’s model for the first time since August 3.
According to Silver, the “one big reason” for Trump’s advantage is Pennsylvania, which he identified as “the tipping-point state more than one-third of the time” in his model “and where it’s been quite a while since we’ve seen a poll showing Harris leading (including two new polls today).”
He also noted that the model is “applying a convention bounce adjustment to Harris’s recent numbers,” meaning that it is assuming that some of her strength in national polls is attributable to the Democratic National Convention. The model assumes that at least part of the “bounce” from the DNC will fade. Silver says that the model will adjust, however, if her polling numbers remain steady in the coming weeks.
Silver went on to explain how the model’s accounting for Harris’s post-convention bounce and relatively weak polling in Pennsylvania have made her the underdog:
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.
“The model puts a lot of weight on this recent data because of all the changes in the race,” he continued. “And you can see why it thinks this is a problem for her: if she’s only tied in Pennsylvania now, during what should be one of her stronger polling periods, that implies being a slight underdog in November.”
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