Nate Silver’s recent “bold prediction” about the 2024 presidential election appears to have been accurate, according to the pollster’s latest forecast.
Vice President Kamala Harris‘ chances of victory have seen a boost since her debate against former President Donald Trump last week, according to Silver’s model, which looks at the candidates’ chances of securing the necessary 270 Electoral College votes in November.
Harris has held the lead in polling for several weeks, and nearly all post-debate surveys have shown that the vice president came out on top after her first matchup with her Republican opponent.
Silver wrote in an update for his Silver Bulletin blog on Tuesday: “The bold prediction I made after last week’s debate looks to be coming true: Kamala Harris is moving up in the polls enough that the model is converging back toward 50/50 in the Electoral College,” adding that the Democratic presidential nominee “is pretty clearly getting a bounce in national polls.”
His averages find Harris 2.9 percentage points ahead of Trump across national polls one week after the debate.
Vice President Kamala Harris looks quizzically at former President Donald Trump (not pictured) as he speaks during the presidential debate on September 10 in Philadelphia. Harris’ chances of winning in November have spiked since the debate, according to pollster Nate Silver.
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“Arguably—arguably!—this is even a little conservative,” Silver added, saying that some polling has found Harris much further ahead of Trump in recent days.
The positive polling string has also led to Harris’ chances in the Electoral College to spike—while Silver’s model gave the vice president a 38.4 percent chance of securing 270 electoral votes on the day of the debate, as of Tuesday, her odds were at 43.5 percent.
Trump’s odds have dipped over the past week. The former president was given a 61.3 percent chance of winning 270 electoral votes on the day of the debate but now sits at 56.2 percent.
FiveThirtyEight gave Trump a much worse prediction on Tuesday. The polling site, which was launched by Silver but since bought by ABC News, found that Trump has a 39 percent chance of winning the Electoral College in November, while Harris has a 61 percent chance. As of Tuesday night, Harris was also up 3 percentage points (48.3 to 45.3 percent) on average across national polls reviewed by FiveThirtyEight.
Silver’s model still finds that Trump has a higher chance of securing four key swing states—Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania—while Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin are all in the tossup range.
Newsweek reached out to Trump and Harris’ campaigns for comment Tuesday night.
Trump has said that his campaign saw a boost in support since his debate against Harris, although one Republican strategist said he was “suspicious” that the former president is in the lead after last week’s onstage clash. An internal memo from Trump’s campaign pollster, Tony Fabrizio, claimed last week that Trump was given a 2-point boost across seven key swing states following the debate. Publicly released polls have not found similar results.
“Every other poll that has been conducted since the debate shows that the movement has been towards Harris, albeit very modest,” Karl Rove, GOP strategist who worked in President George W. Bush‘s administration, said during a Fox News appearance Tuesday.
“I’m always suspicious of campaigns that issue their own numbers in order to correct a bad day … Right now, the evidence tends to lean the other way,” he added.
