Statistician Nate Silver released on Tuesday his first election model since Vice President Kamala Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee.
Silver wrote in Substack that although Harris is favored to win the popular vote, she is "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."
He added that Harris is in a better position than President Biden was when he was the incumbent challenger. Furthermore, Silver said that Biden had a 27% chance of beating Trump before he withdrew from the race.
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Harris quickly coalesced Democratic Party support in the two days after Biden's July 21 announcement that he was ending his 2024 re-election bid against former President Trump and endorsing his vice president.
"Harris will give Democrats a fighting chance," Silver wrote.
He added that the trend of Democrats winning the popular vote could continue: "In fact, she’s a slight favorite over Donald Trump in the popular vote, which Democrats have won in all but one election since 2000. If an election were held today, we’d enter the evening with a lot of uncertainty about the outcome, both because the polling in the pivotal Blue Wall states (Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin) has been close since Biden dropped out of the race and because there’s some intrinsic uncertainty about where the race stands given how much news there’s been lately."
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Silver noted that Biden’s 2020 victory showed a large "Electoral College-popular vote gap" as he barely won several states despite winning the popular vote.
"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," he said.
Silver is notable for successfully predicting 49 of 50 states in the 2008 presidential election. He also predicted President Barack Obama’s 2012 victory.
As Harris is now considered the party's presumptive presidential nominee, she is reportedly going to pick her running mate by Tuesday.
A number of the politicians considered near the top of her list have been campaigning on behalf of the vice president the past few days, including Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro.
