News/Commentary

Polling wizard punctures ‘Kamalot’ balloon, predicts Trump will still win

July 31, 2024 | | Print Article

Democrats have been in a state of euphoria for the last ten days since the party elite overthrew Joe Biden and installed VP Kamala Harris in his place but their joy could soon turn to sadness.

The media may be all-in on the arrival of their “Kamalot” but the reality is that former President Donald J. Trump still has a very good chance of winning the election according to polling guru Nate Silver who just came out with his first post-Biden election forecast model and it’s not good news for the cult of Kamala.

According to Silver, a statistical wizard who crunches the numbers like few others, Harris could win the popular vote in November but like Hillary Clinton, lose the Electoral College vote to Trump, the only score that matters.

The FiveThirtyEight founder gives Trump a 61.3 percent chance of winning the Electoral College with Harris at 38.1 percent which although it’s better than Biden, isn’t going to be good enough to give Democrats the permanent and transformational rule that they’re lusting for.

Harris has a 53.5 percent chance of prevailing in the popular vote versus 46.5 for Trump with the state of California and the populous cities in several blue states always reliably voting Democrat.  The last Republican to win the popular vote was President George W. Bush when he was reelected in 2004.

In Silver’s previous model, Trump had a 65.7 percent chance of defeating the senile incumbent who he described as “incoherent” in a post to X sharing a clip of Biden’s high-stakes debate with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos earlier this month.

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“The most generous way to put it is that he doesn’t seem in command, and that’s an extremely hard sell when you’re Commander in Chief,” the polling guru said on July 5.

“Harris will give Democrats a fighting chance. In fact, she’s a slight favorite over Donald Trump in the popular vote, which Democrats have won in all but one election since 2000. If an election were held today, we’d enter the evening with a lot of uncertainty about the outcome, both because the polling in the pivotal Blue Wall states (Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin) has been close since Biden dropped out of the race and because there’s some intrinsic uncertainty about where the race stands given how much news there’s been lately,” Silver wrote on his Silver Bulletin blog.

“Roughly speaking, the strategy of the Harris campaign should be to triangulate the strategy of Hillary 2016, the Harris 2020 primary campaign, and Biden 2024, and do the exact opposite,” Silver posted to X on Tuesday.

“Needless to say, stranger things have happened than a candidate who was behind in the polls winning. And in America’s polarized political climate, most elections are close and a candidate is rarely out of the running,” Silver said.

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Chris Donaldson
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