Despite a massive psyop campaign to boost Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee, an effort that required the campaign to hide their candidate in plain sight by avoiding any interviews or news conferences, former President Donald Trump is seen as the slight favorite to win in November.
That’s according to polling guru Nate Silver, who points to a single factor that Harris could have affected in making such a determination.
For the first time since August 3, Trump has a 52.4% chance of winning the Electoral College while Harris has a 47.3% chance of coming out on top, according to Silver.
He noted that Harris “had one of her worst days in some time in our forecast,” before acknowledging a possible convention bounce to say the Democrat is ahead by 3.8 points in his national poll tracker.
“There’s another, longer-term concern for Harris, though: it’s been a while since we’ve seen a poll showing her ahead in Pennsylvania, which is the tipping-point state more than a third of the time in our model,” Silver wrote. “Today, in fact, we added one post-DNC poll showing Pennsylvania as a tie, and another (conducted during the DNC) showing either a tie or Trump +1, depending on what version you prefer.”
All of this comes back to Harris’ decision to select Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz over Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro — according to the scuttlebutt, the Jewish governor was not going to be well received by certain factors within the party.
“The model puts a lot of weight on this recent data because of all the changes in the race,” he continued. “And you can see why it thinks this is a problem for her: if she’s only tied in Pennsylvania now, during what should be one of her stronger polling periods, that implies being a slight underdog in November.”
The FiveThirtyEight founder said that things “could change quickly with one or two high-quality polls showing Harris ahead in the Keystone State,” and also noted that it’s possible the model “is overdoing the convention bounce adjustment.”
“But for now, we now show a 17 percent chance that Harris wins the popular vote but not the Electoral College, a big concern for her campaign all along,” Silver wrote. “If she won the popular vote nationally by between 1 and 2 points, for instance, the model estimates that she’d still be a 70/30 underdog in the Electoral College.”
As for being passed over, Shapiro took the high road when he posted on X: “Vice President Kamala Harris has my enthusiastic support – and I know that Governor Tim Walz is an exceptionally strong addition to the ticket who will help Kamala move our country forward.”
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Tom Tillison grew up in Maryland before moving to Central Florida as a young teen. It is in the Sunshine State that he honed both his passion for politics and his writing skills. Tillison also contributes to BizPac Review.
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