Two noted election prognosticators have studied the 2024 presidential election between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris and have come up with wildly contrasting predictions on who will emerge victorious in November.
Nate Silver, who founded the FiveThirtyEight polling method, said the former president’s “chances of winning are his highest since July 30,” while noting that the “forecast is still in toss-up range.”
He said Harris failed to get a sustained bump from last month’s Democratic National Convention.
“There’s room to debate the convention bounce stuff, but Harris has been getting a lot of mediocre state polls lately,” he said on his Substack page, Silver Bulletin.
He said Trump’s chances of winning have climbed to 58.2%, while Harris’ have fallen to 41.6%.
On the other hand, Allan Lichtman, known as the “Nostradamus” of presidential election predictions who has boasted of correctly calling the results going back to 1984, said Harris will win.
“The Democrats will hold on to the White House, and Kamala Harris will be the next president of the United States,” Lichtman said in the video of his predictions in the New York Times.
“At least, that’s my prediction for this race,” said the 77-year-old Lichtman, who was one of the few to accurately predict Trump’s win over Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Lichtman, an American University professor, eschews traditional polling and instead focuses on his “Keys to the White House,” a series of 13 true-or-false questions.
The keys range from who is in the White House, to the shape of the economy, to third-party candidates, to social unrest, scandal and American involvement in foreign affairs or military operations.
Harris is ahead in eight of the keys, while Trump leads in three.
“Foreign policy is tricky, and these keys could flip. The Biden administration is deeply invested in the war in Gaza, which is a humanitarian disaster with no end in sight,” he noted.
“But even if both foreign policy keys flipped false, that would mean that there were only five negative keys, which would not be enough for Donald Trump to regain the White House,” Lichtman predicted.
Silver bases his predictions on polling, and he sees trouble ahead for Harris in the Electoral College. Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 but lost the Electoral College.
While the vice president has a 3-point lead nationally, Silver says she is underperforming his model’s predictions for a post convention bounce.
“By the model’s logic, she has gone from a lead of 2.3 points to a convention-bounce adjusted lead of 1.5 points. That’s not a game-changing difference, but it’s enough to show up in the bottom line,” he said.
Silver’s methodology shows Harris has lost ground in six of seven battleground states that are crucial to winning the Electoral College.
But Trump has gained a single percent in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
