Who Will Win the Election? AI Predicts Electoral College Map

Vice President Kamala Harris is on track to narrowly win the 2024 presidential election, according to a new analysis based on artificial intelligence (AI), with 276 Electoral College votes against 262 for Republican rival Donald Trump.

British betting company Bonus Code Bets asked ChatGPT, an AI language model developed by OpenAI, to assess which candidate would win each state based on publicly available polling information, demographics and historic election results. It concluded that Harris would win the key swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada, but lose in Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina.

Recent polling suggests the 2024 presidential election remains too close to call, with a model produced by election aggregator FiveThirtyEight giving Harris a 1.4 point lead with 48.1 percent of the vote, against Trump’s 46.7 percent.

However, due to the Electoral College system, a candidate can win the popular vote but lose the election, as Hillary Clinton did in 2016, and FiveThirtyEight gives Trump a 52 percent chance of winning overall, against 48 percent for Harris.

For its analysis, Bonus Code Bets told ChatGPT to “predict how each state will vote in the 2024 presidential election, using all available information including polling information, demographics, as well as looking at previous results and relevant events in the state during the current campaign.”

The 14-vote Electoral College lead it gave Harris would be the third-closest in American history, after Rutherford B. Hayes’ 1876 victory by one vote and George W. Bush‘s 2000 defeat of Al Gore by five votes. However, if Trump wins either Pennsylvania or Michigan, with 19 and 15 Electoral College votes respectively, it would be enough to hand him victory, according to the model.

Newsweek contacted representatives of the Harris and Trump presidential election campaigns for comment via email on Wednesday outside of regular office hours.

Speaking to Newsweek, a Bonus Code Bets spokesperson said: “For years, opinion polls have been used to indicate the outcome of elections, but new technology provides new ways for results to be predicted.

“And having such a powerful AI tool look at the entirety of the campaign and still predicting that Kamala Harris will win by a single state shows just how close this election will be.”

In its analysis, Bonus Code Bets emphasized the importance of the major cities to the wins it predicts for Harris in both Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Referring to ChatGPT, the company said: “In Michigan, whilst Trump is likely to hold the rural areas, which are Republican strongholds, it backs Harris to rely on key Democratic strongholds in cities like Detroit and Ann Arbor to maintain its blue shift.

“Likewise, Pennsylvania is tipped to marginally vote for Kamala despite Donald’s strong support in the Rust Belt region—relying on votes from the big cities of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.”

On Tuesday President Joe Biden sparked controversy after appearing to describe Trump supporters as “garbage” in a Zoom call. However, speaking to Newsweek, White House spokesperson Andrew Bates insisted he had been referring specifically to the “hateful rhetoric coming out of the Madison Square Garden rally.”

It came after comedian Tony Hinchcliffe sparked controversy on Sunday by describing Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage” when speaking ahead of Trump at the former president’s Madison Square Garden rally in New York.

Despite the controversy, the odds of Trump winning on November 5 have improved over the past 24 hours, according to a number of leading bookmakers. On Tuesday both Bet365 and Paddy Power were offering odds of 1-2 (66.7 percent) on a Trump victory, but this had been cut to 10-21 (67.7 percent) and 4-9 (69.2 percent) respectively by 4 a.m. ET on Wednesday.