by R. Cort Kirkwood, The New American:
Vice President Kamala Harris is polling better against President Donald Trump in general election polls than former candidate and President Joe Biden, but she is still forecast to lose on November 5.
Election prognosticator Nate Silver gives Harris a better chance of winning the popular vote than Trump. But like Hillary Clinton in 2016, she might well lose the Electoral College that settles the election.
As well, the Real Clear Politics Average of general election polls gives Trump a two-point lead nationally, and he’s ahead in six of the seven all-important battleground states that could tip the election for either candidate.
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Silver’s forecast, the strong possibility that Trump could again lose the popular vote but win the election, is the reason Democrats want to abolish the Electoral College. They’ve been pushing to do so since 2000, when George W. Bush lost the popular vote to Al Gore but won the college.
Big uptick for Harris today on quite a bit of new polling.https://t.co/vsGVG189Sa pic.twitter.com/8GhbRR4559
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) July 31, 2024
Silver’s Forecast
This morning, Silver laid out the probabilities for Harris and Trump.
As the popular vote goes, Harris wins, with a 57.1 to 42.9 percent chance of winning the popular vote.
But the popular vote, of course, doesn’t settle presidential elections in the United States. The Electoral College does.
Thus does Trump’s chance of winning stand at 56.9 percent against Harris’ 42.5. Silver’s model gives Trump 273.8 electoral votes against Harris’ 263.6.
As Silver wrote at his Silver Bulletin website, “Harris will give Democrats a fighting chance. 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.”
But that might not matter, he continued:
However, she’s 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. 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. 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.
Right now, Silver has Harris ahead in his average of election polls, 44.5 percent to 44.1
Real Clear Politics Average
Silver’s model that puts Harris ahead of Trump differs dramatically than the Real Clear Politics Average, which put Trump ahead of Harris by two points, 48.1-46.1
Trump has prevailed in 15 of the last 20 polls.
And again, in the crucial battleground states, Trump has maintained the lead that he established over Biden except in Michigan, where Harris is ahead by two points.
Trump leads by the following margins in the rest:
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