Prominent Pollster's Election Model Shows Surge for Trump as Kamala Gets Bad News from Swing States
If you have sensed growing momentum for former President Donald Trump in the last two weeks, you’re in good company.
On Friday, prominent establishment pollster Nate Silver — who founded ABC’s FiveThirtyEight — released a new set of projections based on what he called “more mediocre swing state polls” for Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
In short, former President Donald Trump’s odds of winning the 2024 election surged to their highest point since the Harris campaign began.
According to the polling aggregator InteractivePolls on the social media platform X, Aug. 23 represents a key date in the momentum shift toward Trump.
At that point, Silver gave Harris a 53.5 percent chance of winning the election compared to 46.1 percent for Trump.
On that date, however, Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suspended his campaign and forged an alliance with Trump.
In fact, Kennedy and Trump appeared together that evening at an electrifying rally in Arizona.
Since then, the polling data has steadily trended in Trump’s direction.
Thus, as of Friday, Silver gave Trump a 61.5 percent chance of winning the election compared to Harris’s 38.3 percent.
Data from seven swing states helps account for Trump’s projected advantage.
For instance, Silver placed Trump’s odds of victory in Arizona and North Carolina at 75 and 74 percent, respectively. That would flip Arizona and its 11 electoral votes to Trump based on the 2020 election’s certified results.
The big news, however, involved two other states that President Joe Biden carried in 2020, according to certified results.
Silver gave Trump a 67 percent chance of victory in Georgia and a 62 percent chance in Pennsylvania.
Assuming other 2020 results hold, those two states, along with Arizona, would return the former president to the White House.
Furthermore, to illustrate Trump’s strength across all swing states, Silver also made the former president the favorite in Nevada, Wisconsin and Michigan.
#Latest @NateSilver538 forecast (chance of winning)
August 23
🟦 Harris: 53.5%
🟥 Trump: 46.1%September 6
🟥 Trump: 61.5%
🟦 Harris: 38.3%
——
Swing States: chance of winningPennsylvania – 🔴 Trump 62-38%
Michigan – 🔴 Trump 52-48%
Wisconsin – 🔴 Trump 52-48%
Arizona – 🔴… pic.twitter.com/2JqxjoAr5O— InteractivePolls (@IAPolls2022) September 6, 2024
Meanwhile, Silver himself posted a chart showing an aggregate of polls in Pennsylvania.
That aggregate, featuring “mediocre swing state polls for Harris” of late, showed the vice president with a narrow lead, though that obviously did not stop Silver from giving Trump a 62 percent chance of winning the state.
Today’s numbers.
More mediocre swing state polls for Harris, and her lead in national polls is down a tick, too, to 3.0 points.
Note that these polling averages aren’t affected by convention bounce stuff.
More coming soon.https://t.co/vsGVG18HHI pic.twitter.com/RAr5mI22uH
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) September 6, 2024
In Friday’s “Silver Bulletin,” the pollster characterized Harris as “underperforming in swing states relative to her national numbers.”
He went on to describe that underperformance as “a theme lately, especially in Pennsylvania.”
So what to make of all this pro-Trump optimism?
In recent years, of course, pollsters have not exactly covered themselves in glory.
To illustrate that point, I like to remind readers that in 2020 the final RealClearPolling average showed Trump with a narrow one-point lead over Biden in the expected swing state of Ohio. Trump won the state by 8.2 percentage points.
Similar exaggerations of Biden’s support occurred elsewhere, including Wisconsin and Iowa.
The point is not that state polls are always wrong, but that when they are wrong, they nearly always underestimate Trump’s support.
That, of course, raises questions not only about pollsters’ methods but about their intentions. If you think establishment pollsters would not manipulate their data so as to push a narrative that benefits the establishment candidate, then you do not know the establishment very well.
Thus, the fact that Silver has already made Trump a strong favorite means that the former president almost certainly has a much larger lead than any of the more pro-Harris polling averages suggest.
Either way, for all his juggernaut-ish qualities as a political figure, Trump may very well owe a particular thanks to Kennedy for this recent surge.
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