The vice president feels as though she has momentum heading into November. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.
As an election expert predicts a haunting reality for Kamala Harris.
Leftist are rejoicing now that President Joe Biden has dropped out of the 2024 election and Vice President Kamala Harris has taken his place as the presumptive Democrat nominee for president.
But the Left better be careful for what they wish for. They may not realize it yet, but they’re clearly in a honeymoon phase regarding the so-called popularity of Harris as their presidential candidate.
Kamala Harris’ Positive Momentum: It’s Not What It Seems
The media hype surrounding Vice President Kamala Harris’s candidacy in the Democratic presidential race has faced a harsh reality check.
According to a scientific model published on Tuesday, former President Donald Trump, the GOP nominee, is strongly favored to win the upcoming election.
Statistician Nate Silver’s model, which synthesizes polling data and other factors to forecast election outcomes, predicts a significant advantage for Trump over Harris.
The model indicates that Trump has a 61.3 percent chance of winning, while Harris stands at 38.1 percent. This essentially gives Trump a better than three-in-five chance of victory, leaving Harris with less than two-in-five odds.
This outcome spells trouble for Democrats, who had hoped that changing their candidate would greatly alter the race’s dynamics.
Interestingly, as Silver notes, his forecast aligns closely with prediction markets where real money is wagered on election outcomes.
Here's my overview of the new state of the race. Harris is a popular vote favorite and an Electoral College underdog—but much less of an underdog than Biden. https://t.co/R5pxYKgByC
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) July 30, 2024
Silver temporarily paused his model when President Joe Biden withdrew from the race just over a week ago, allowing time to gather updated data for the new Trump-Harris matchup.
Prior to Biden’s exit, Trump was already significantly ahead, with Biden’s chances falling below 30 percent. Although Harris’s numbers slightly improve upon Biden’s lowest points, she does not significantly shift the race’s direction, with Trump still positioned as the frontrunner.
And even though Silver’s analysis suggests that Harris may slightly edge out Trump in the popular vote, Trump holds a substantial advantage in the electoral college. Silver even anticipates that Harris’s performance in the electoral college will lag behind her popular vote results, potentially worse than Biden’s 2020 showing. This situation hints at a challenging path ahead for Democrats, as they face the possibility of another popular vote-electoral college split similar to the 2000 and 2016 elections.
While Silver acknowledges that Harris “will give Democrats a fighting chance” and is “a slight favorite over Donald Trump in the popular vote, which Democrats have won in all but one election since 2000,” he also notes that she is “a modest underdog to Trump in the Electoral College.”
“Harris isn’t unique in this regard: Biden also had a large Electoral College-popular vote gap in 2020, barely winning several tipping-point states despite winning the popular vote by 4.5 percentage points,” Silver states. “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.”
Silver’s analysis further breaks down the candidates’ prospects across key battleground states. Trump is favored in several critical states, with over 70 percent chances in Georgia, North Carolina, and Arizona. In Michigan and Pennsylvania, Trump’s odds are estimated at over 57 percent, while Wisconsin remains the closest battleground, with a nearly 53 percent likelihood of a Trump victory. Trump is also heavily favored to win Nevada, with over a 65 percent chance.
As more data emerges, the election outcome could become easier to predict, but the current model suggests that Democrats are facing a steep uphill battle, even after swapping Biden for Harris.
Stay tuned to The Federalist Wire.
