Top pollster finds Trump gaining momentum against Harris – with 58% chance of winning 2024 race
Former President Donald Trump’s chances of winning the 2024 election have surged in the last month while Vice President Kamala Harris has struggled to find “a 2nd gear,” according to polling guru Nate Silver.
The data analyst and founder of FiveThirtyEight revealed Wednesday that his presidential race model now indicates that Trump has a 58.2% chance of winning the Electoral College in November compared to Harris’ 41.6% chance.
“Trump’s chances of winning are his highest since July 30,” Silver wrote in his latest election forecast bulletin. “And the chance of an Electoral College-popular vote split working against Harris has risen to almost 18 percent.”
Silver’s model predicts that Harris has a 58.9% chance of winning the national popular vote — which has no bearing on the winner of the race — but that Trump will rack up 274 Electoral College votes, topping the vice president’s 263 estimated Electoral College total.
Two-hundred seventy Electoral College votes are needed to win the presidency.
“There was a surge of enthusiasm for Harris post-Biden dropout, but that might have happened no matter what,” Silver noted on X.
The pollster also argued that Harris tapping Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate over swing-state Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shaprio, as well as keeping most of President Biden’s campaign team in place, may have been missteps.
“Thought convention speech was good, but bypassing Shapiro beginning to look bad and they haven’t really found a 2nd gear after Hot Brat Summer,” he continued.
In a separate tweet, Silver said, “I think I’d buy the bull case for Harris a bit more if she hadn’t rehired so many of the Biden people.”
Overall Silver’s model still pegs the race as a “toss-up” between the two candidates.
His analysis follows an ABC News/Ipsos poll released on Labor Day which showed Harris failed to get an anticipated bump in support following last month’s Democratic National Convention, leaving the 2024 horse race essentially unchanged.
Trump and Harris are also virtually tied in two of the battleground states that could decide the election, with a CNN/SSRS survey released Wednesday showing them each receiving 47% support in Pennsylvania and the vice president leading the former president 48%-47% in Georgia.