Election analyst Nate Silver has assigned former President Donald Trump a record-high probability of winning against Vice President Kamala Harris. The boost in Trump’s chances comes partly from the latest New York Times/Sienna poll, which Silver rates highly. His updated forecast gives Trump a 63.8% chance of victory, compared to Harris’s 36%. Silver also predicts that Trump is likely to win in every swing state, the Washington Examiner reported on Sunday.
Silver’s latest odds indicate that Trump has a 64% chance of winning Pennsylvania, 54% for Michigan, 53% for Wisconsin, 77% for Arizona, 75% for North Carolina, 68% for Georgia, and 61% for Nevada. The updated forecast marks a nearly five-point increase for Trump since Thursday, when his probability was at 58.2%, up from 52.4% the previous week. The prediction reflects a continuing decline in Harris’s initial support following President Joe Biden’s exit from the race in July. In a Substack post, Silver explained that the new poll was such bad news for Harris due to the large sample size and reliability of the poll, which he ranks as the second best. He said the new poll “confirms the model’s view that there’s been some sort of a shift in momentum in the race.”
The election analyst highlighted the growing concern among Democrats that Harris is perceived as too progressive. The poll reveals that 47% of likely voters view Harris as too liberal, while only 32% see Trump as too conservative. “I’m not a messaging-and-tactics guy like Dan Pfieffer, but I’m not quite sure how Harris is supposed to spin her way out of this perception,” he wrote. “Her convention speech was aggressively centrist and aimed at male voters, which I thought was smart. But there’s a track record here of progressive policy advocacy on the 2019 campaign trail and in her voting record in the Senate.” Her attempt to spin the issue presents a problem in itself, Silver argued.
“The flip-flopping may explain why Harris has been weirdly reluctant to do media hits or articulate policy specifics,” he continued. “This strategy may have worked well enough when she was riding high off the vibes of the Democrats’ candidate swap, but it’s causing her more problems now.” In addition to flip-flopping, Harris has developed a habit of adopting many of Trump’s positions, including his plan to exempt tips from income taxes, keep US Steel under American ownership, and implement tough border enforcement policies.
