Nate Silver Reveals The One Battleground State That Could Cost Kamala The White House
Polling and data guru Nate Silver said Thursday that Vice President Kamala Harris is poised to be a “slight underdog” in Pennsylvania, a crucial battleground state with 19 electoral college points.
Silver, a prominent elections analyst and statistician, wrote on Substack that while Harris is leading by 3.8 points in his national poll tracker and is slated to win the popular vote, his nuanced election forecast model predicts former President Trump is electorally favored to win the White House by a 52.4% chance, versus Harris, who now shows a 47.3% chance of pulling off an electoral victory.
“Kamala Harris had one of her worst days in some time in our forecast on Thursday despite gaining in our national polling average,” Silver wrote.
But, he continued, “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.”
The latest Emerson College swing state poll shows Trump and Harris tied at 48% each in Pennsylvania.
“The model puts a lot of weight on this recent data because of all the changes in the race,” Silver explained. “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.”
At the current date, Silver said his model shows a 17% chance that Harris wins the popular vote but not the Electoral College, calling it “a big concern for her campaign all along.
“If she won the popular vote nationally by between 1 and 2 points, for instance, the model estimates that she’d still be a 70/30 underdog in the Electoral College,” he wrote.
Still, Silver acknowledged that Harris’ unusually late entry into the race could skew his forecast results.
“While there’s a solid basis for this empirically, you could argue we’re under unusual circumstances because of her late entry into the race. So if you want to treat all of this as a little fuzzier than usual, I don’t really mind that,” he wrote.
