Here we are at Election Day. It’s been a long road. At some point along the way I thought I’d be doing one of these every night as the election got close. Unfortunately, that ran straight into my need to make a living. But here’s one final probabilistic analysis as the campaign draws to a close.
The Traditional Version
Let’s remind ourselves how these work. I took data for electoral-vote.com either averaging the polls from the last fifteen days or taking the single latest poll if there are no polls in the last 15 days.
We ran 40,000 simulated elections and tallied the results. We ended up with almost 73% of victories going toward Kamala Harris. Running all the states it looks like Harris has at least a 70% chance of winning with less than a 30% probability. I’ve talked about why that is likely an overestimate of Harris’s chances.
That’s why we started running a second simulation.
In our swings-only projection we give every state that is not a swing state to either the Democratic or Republican candidate. That means Harris starts at 226 electoral votes and Trump builds from 213. That’s a slight advantage for Harris.
These simulations give us a 59% probability of a Kamala Harris victory and about a 40% chance of winning for Donald Trump. That’s close but not so close as projected by other sites. It’s going to be a long night but Harris has an edge.
It’s 12:12 AM on election day and I may as well get this thing started. I’ll be adding stuff throughout the day and I’ll be live blogging the results come 7 PM on the East Coast.
My second priority is to get some sleep. That’s in a few minutes but right now I’m watching Dixville Notch New Hampshire cast the first ballots of the 2024 General election.
Is a nice start to the day, a display of pure democracy. The results are in and we have a 3 to 3 tie in Dixville Notch. I’ve been hoping this thing wouldn’t turn out to be as close as everyone seems to think. With luck this won’t be a harbinger of electoral tight ropes yet to come.
I’ll be adding a lot of stuff during the day. The featured image is an electoral map from my final probabilistic look at the election. That might be job number one when I get up. That or my final prediction.
In the meantime, you might be interested in my last probabilistic look at the election. That was a part of Dr. Steve Coleman‘s 37th political pundit night on October 24 th. That’s the video just below and I start at about 5:45 in.
More in the morning.
It’s 7:23 am! Good Morning.
I think I’ll start with my best guess on where the US Senate is going to land. First though, a quick commercial.
I’m mostly looking at the data on electoralvote.com. I’ve been following that site since 2004 and this year they are, IMO, the best source of well considered, clear minded, daily updates on the election.
That link is supposed to update; you can get their current results by clicking the link.
Senate Projection
They currently have the Senate at 48 Democrats and 52 Republicans. I think it’s likely two of the four races that they rate as barely Republican will fall back to the Democratic side. That makes my prediction 50-50 with the winner of the vice presidency deciding Senate control.
There are a couple reasons for that. There are abortion referendums on the ballot in 10 states and since the Dobbs decision those have driven turnout that strongly favors the Democrats. Two of the four are well-regarded incumbents who have demonstrated their ability to win in Ohio and Montana. It also seems like Elon Musk is too inexperienced to be running GOTV efforts.
I’d like to be able to predict that Josh Hawley and Rick Scott will lose this time out but I think their states are too red for that.
Still, if there is an undetected blue wave 54 seats for the Democrats seems not impossibly insane. 
Presidential Projection
Well, now it’s 2:19 PM. The stupid day job, which I’m normally quite happy with keeps getting in the way of my geeking out on election stuff today. But after mulling it over in between all the other stuff, I’m ready to call this. At the macro level, I’m predicting Harris will win. She isn’t just leading in the probabilistic analysis that I have published today, but I think the buzz is good. She ended the campaign on a positive note and a professional one. In the meantime, there’s been even more weirdness than usual in the Trump campaign, and although that never seems to make much of a difference, I suspect this time will be a bit different.
The micro level is a bit more nuanced. I’m a bit gun shy after 2020. The Saturday before the election a Trump campaign caravan, which may have just been a bunch of his civilian supporters ran a Biden campaign bus off the road. I was pretty shaken by that and I thought when news went around, there would be a big swing in Biden‘s direction. It never materialized, so my “official” projection was way off.
My gut says that given the salience of women’s issues, the abortion issue, and the collective desire of the polling community to not underestimate Trump support this time plus a bunch of other things could have this swinging dramatically in Harris’s direction. But I’m not seeing that in the numbers. What I have seen is this particular configuration cropping up time and time again across my analysis and a bunch of other people’s analyses. Plus, even though the margins are small Harris has been consistently ahead for a week or more in the rustbelt states in Nevada.
That leads me to this projection 276 for Harris 262 for Trump. It wouldn’t surprise me if every swing state tilted in Harris’s direction or even if every swing state tilted together in one direction or the other. Based on the numbers, though this is my best guess.
2:56 PM
Here’s some interesting contacts to the Dixville notch numbers. At a first glance 3 to 3 look like looks like it portends a close election. Here are some context, though. These voters were four Republicans and two independents. all six of them voted for Nikki Haley in the Republican primary.
If the Haley voters split 50-50 between Harris and Trump, Donald Trump is toast.
7:24 PM
I got home and had dinner, and now I’m diving in. No real surprises so far except that it took 6 minutes to call Indiana for Trump. So, Kentucky and Indiana are called for Trump, and Vermont for Harris.
I’m looking forward to the live blog from electoral-vote.com.
7:28 pm.
Two minutes to closings at North Carolina, Ohio, and West Virginia.
Bernie Sanders is reelected in Vermont! Yay!
10 seconds.
I keep saying this: “Too Early to Call” is not a call. West Virginia is called for Trump. Jim Justice picked up the senate seat in WV. Also, we’ve been to the Moon.
7:45 PM
There has been a spate of bomb threats at polling locations in DeKalb County, GA. Biden won DeKalb in 2020 with 83% of the vote. Someone is scared.
7:57 PM
The polls close in sixteen states in mere minutes. It’s usually like this; there are always some red states that are called early. It will be nice to see Harris get some points on the board.
8:00 PM
Florida is called Trump. Not surprising but having grown up there it still makes me sad. So many states.
Here’s where we are from the NYTimes,
It looks like Harris is underperforming Biden in Georgia.
Harris is running up a big lead in Pennsylvania because this time, the mail ballots are being counted first. It makes me think a quote that’s attributed to LBJ, “Always count your votes last.”
Georgia and North Carolina seem to be on the ball counting the votes this time.
8:57 PM
In three minutes all but eight states will have closed their polls. We have closings from Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Louisiana, Minnesota, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Wisconsin, Wyoming.
Four or five calls for Trump, including Texas. Not even New York called for Harris. The democrats usually get off to a slow start in Electoral Votes but this is getting ridiculous.
Some of the signs of Harris underperforming and Trump overperforming in Georgia seem to be replicated in North Carolina. There are good signs in the urban areas but those could get swapped by the same-day votes.
9:24 PM
SarahMcBride is elected to Congress from Delaware. She will be the first openly transgender member of congress.
9:29 PM
New York called for Harris. Finally.
9:49 PM
A bunch of races and states that NBC had as “too early to call” have been recharacterized as “too close to call.” That is every Presidential and Senate race in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
There is reporting that there are long lines at college campuses in all the rust belt states. That’s a positive sign. There is also some good signs for Harris in suburbs in Georgia.
There are still people voting in Nevada who have a three hour wait. That means there will be no data out of Nevada until at least 2 AM.
11:18 PM
Moreno is projected to be the winner of the Senate Seat in Ohio. That’s a huge loss. Brown was an outstanding Senator. Still, that means that the Republicans will almost certainly control the Senate next year.
I’m hearing second hand reports from the Harris campaign. I’m afraid it sound’s like whistling through a graveyard. I want to be wrong here.
They just called Connecticut for Harris. The mere fact that that took hours is a bad sign. Kornacki is talking Trump making big gains in Virginia, New Jersey, and New York. Those are safe blue states but these are not good signs.
11:35 PM
I want some analysis about the effects of the coordinated series of bomb threats that we saw throughout the country. Polling places were cleared; there was a chilling effect on the voters affected. Could this have swung a state or two? Were the precincts targeted at random were the calls targeted at Democratic leaning locations? I have a lot of questions.
11:40 PM
North Carolina is called for Trump. I expected it but I was hoping it would turn out otherwise.
12:12 AM
Let’s check in on the state of the race.
12:26 AM
I’m probably going to hang this up for this evening. Pennsylvania isn’t looking good (well, not just Pennsylvania). The talking heads on the teevee sound like they’re already doing an autopsy.
Has Donald Trump declared victory yet? That’s a weird amount of discipline for that gentleman.
I’ll jump back on if anything significant happens assuming I’m still awake. I may not sleep for four years.
12:35 PM
And just as I write that the call Georgia for Trump. Harris still has a path to victory but it’s frighteningly narrow. There are also a number of states that should not have been swing states that remain to be called.
They’ve called the Senate races in Nebraska (no, the other one) and Utah for Republicans Deb Fischer and John Curtis. That clinches Senate control for the Republicans.
The Harris campaign co-chair just gave a lackluster address and told Harris’s supporters to go home for the evening but that she will address the nation tomorrow. Donald Trump is leading in four of the remaining swing states.
New Mexico has finally been called for Harris and they called Virginia when I wasn’t looking.
1:00
All the polls are closed as voting wraps up in Alaska.
Having a day job can be a drag, I promised myself that I would keep up with these but, as usually happens that intention was trampled by the sheer amount of work generated by the college and my classes. If I publish these as much as I’d like as the election draws nearer, most updates will need to look more like this.
Any commentary I would offer would be stale, but here is the map (in the featured image), the shifts, and the results for the 30 September Data.
You can get a better look at the featured image on the blog.
Shifts:
State
Change
New Mexico
Strongly Democratic to Leaning Democratic
State
Change
Nebraska 2nd
Leaning Democratic to Strongly Democratic
Michigan
Barely Democratic to Leaning Democratic
Nevada
Toss Up to Barely Democratic
Results
It’s reasonable to characterize this as roughly 3 to 1 in Harris’s favor.
Last Words
These probabilities are still mostly driven by Harris’s advantage in the Dark Blue vs. Dark Red categories. Florida and Oregon are also probably shifting back and forth more than is reasonable.
Let’s get right to it. This is the first time since 14 August that one of the candidates had led in a victorious number of electoral votes.
The State of the Race
It’s been another crazy week.
It turns out that the happening at Trump’s golf course in West Palm Beach wasn’t random passersby engaging in gunplay. There was someone with an AK-47 at the edge of the golf course as Trump approached the fifth hole. The only gunfire though came from the Secret Service. The perpetrator was quickly apprehended. This is certainly an incident, but lots of folks are stopping short of calling it an “assassination attempt.”
Most of the polls this week have been very helpful for Vice President Harris. In fact, of the 12 polls that showed up on electoral-vote.com on Thursday, Donald Trump only led in one. There was a tied result in Pennsylvania, and the rest favored Harris. We could be seeing a debate bump finally taking hold.
In light of this, we notice that there has been a spate of anti-democratic stories this week. The Georgia elections board has mandated that ballot be counted by hand. That will grind the process to a halt and create chaos. In Ohio, the Secretary of State has written a very misleading description of an anti-gerrymandering amendment that will be up for a vote. And Senator Lindsay Graham has gone to Nebraska in hopes of convincing their legislature to switch the way, they allocate electoral votes to a winner-take-all system. Part of running a free and fair election involves not changing the rules late in the game, making this Nebraska thing seem like dirty pool. There’s more that I’ll leave you to hunt down.
Results:
As always we ran 40,000 simulations of the election as though it were being held today based on this week’s polling data from electoral-vote.com. Harris won 75% of these simulations, Trump won 24% and the remaining 1% were tied. In other words, it looks like the odds of Harris winning the election are at 3 to 1.
You can understand why Lindsay Graham went to Nebraska. If this map is correct, even if Donald Trump were to win every state marked as a tossup Harris would win 270 to 268. Changing how Nebraska allocates its electoral votes turns it into a 269 to 269 tie.
Probably not though because Harris is slightly ahead in Nevada and North Carolina. If we add in how the tossup states lean, this becomes a victory for Harris 292 to 246 EV.
That’s not a great way of looking at it though because in addition to the tossup states, the light blue and light red states are all close to or inside the margin of error. That excludes Oregon. We only have one poll from Oregon and it’s not as light blue as it seems.
The optimum way of looking at this might be Harris: 226, Trump: 189. Harris’s 3 to 1 odds notwithstanding this could still go either way.
Trends:
Digging in state-by-state, we can see that the bulk of the shifts this week are good news for Vice-President Harris. Let’s start with the states that have a redshift.
State
Change
Indiana
Leaning Republican to Strongly Republican
Maine 2nd
Leaning Democratic to Leaning Republican
Maine
Strongly Democratic to Leaning Democratic
Virginia
Strongly Democratic to Leaning Democratic
Like Colorado and Arkansas last week, the shift in Indiana doesn’t tell us anything that we didn’t already know. Last week’s result was based on one that was months old and just didn’t capture how red Indiana really is.
The shift in Maine’s second district is a big one, but it puts the Maine 2nd more or less back where it had been before the previous poll. That’s not really a surprise. Because of the change in the Maine 2nd, Maine as a whole seems a little less blue. Virginia’s shift is a small one right at the borderline between those two categories.
State
Change
Iowa
Strongly Republican to Leaning Republican
Florida
Leaning Democratic to Barely Republican
Pennsylvania
Toss Up to Barely Democratic
New Hampshire
Leaning Democratic to Strongly Democratic
New Mexico
Leaning Democratic to Strongly Democratic
Rhode Island
Leaning Democratic to Strongly Democratic
Looking at these states with a blue shift the one non-story here is Pennsylvania. That’s just a happy little dance within the margin of error.
Iowa though was a surprise. Donald Trump had an 18 point lead that shrunk to meager four points. The race in Florida, meanwhile has looked like it’s been tightening for a while. Perhaps it really is.
New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Rhode Island all could be the same story as Indiana. All of the states though have been polled multiple times; New Hampshire and New Mexico were looking downright swingy for a while. If these three are legitimately safely blue that frees up some resources that could be better used in, to pick a couple of states at random, Iowa and Florida.
Last Words
As much as I would rather continue to pontificate here, there is unfortunately other work I need to get to. We’ll check in again next week and see if these trends continue.
This is my first update on my new schedule. I downloaded the data from ElectoralVote.com yesterday, the 14th, at around noon and I’m processing it today on Sunday. With luck, I’ll have this out tonight.
The State of the Race
It’s been a bizarre 10 days! Monday seems like a lifetime ago. It was on Monday when I clicked on a “Cats for Trump” hashtag on Twitter or whatever the hell it’s called now. It struck me as pitiful. It seemed like Trump’s people were out of ideas and were trying anything to move the needle or slow Harris’s momentum.
Tuesday was the debate. It was a solid and clean win for Harris. We got the Trump we saw in the first debate and his furious firehose of falsehoods. That should have been disqualifying then, but we and the media were too busy realizing that President Biden is an octogenarian. In the second round, we got more of the same from Donald Trump with the added bonus that Kamala Harris was really able to piss him off. That led to some crazy, incoherent rants. It turns out it’s pretty easy to push that guy’s buttons as Vladimir Putin and a bunch of others figured out long ago. The only people I saw arguing that Donald Trump won the debate were on right-wing websites where they probably didn’t have the option of saying anything else.
Unfortunately, there are so few undecided voters at this point that the debate didn’t move the needle immediately. As things get played over and over over on the teevee machine some stuff will reach critical mass and start to sink in. A debate bump does not need to be instantaneous.
Oh. Also, the debate and a crudely made AI likeness inspired Taylor Swift to finally endorse Kamala Harris. Trump responded by saying that he hates her while making a knockoff of one of her concert T-shirts. This will eventually be hilarious, but not for Trump.
The latest news is that there was gunfire this afternoon near Trump’s golf course in West Palm Beach. I knew that neighborhood or did 20 years ago. It’s fine, but gunfire isn’t all that surprising. The Trump campaign tried to color this as a second assassination attempt. I guess we’ll see.
Results:
We ran our usual 40,000 simulations of the election. If the election were today it looks like Harris would win about seven out of 10 times. Trump’s chances are close to three out of 10 and as usual we’re seeing about one percent of the results turn out to be ties.
That seems to track. Harris’s collection of “safe” votes is growing and is nearly twice as large as Trump’s. That’s a big driver of the probability. Make no mistake, there are enough toss-up votes that this thing could go either way.
Trends:
We can go back to tracking the individual changes because we’re on our second week of taking polls back 15 days. We have apples-to-apples comparisons. I’ve split the shifts into the moves toward the left and the moves toward the right.
Colorado and Arkansas don’t really show us any recent changes. Those states have probably been in the strong columns for months. It’s just that they haven’t been polled in a long time. We’ll see the same thing when we finally get new polls from Oregon and Indiana.
State
Change
Colorado
Leaning Democratic to Strongly Democratic
Virginia
Leaning Democratic to Strongly Democratic
Michigan
Toss Up to Barely Democratic
Ohio
Strongly Republican to Leaning Republican
Michigan and Wisconsin don’t tell us too much either. These are small shifts on the edges of the categories. Light blue, light red, and taupe are all mostly inside the margin of error.
State
Change
Wisconsin
Leaning Democratic to Barely Democratic
Arkansas
Leaning Republican to Strongly Republican
Virginia and Ohio on the other hand are pretty big shifts and are mostly in Harris’s direction. Ohio doesn’t look likely to turn blue, but if it shifts into a place where it’s competitive and Virginia settles into being safely blue that could inspire a potentially game-changing shift of resources.
Last Words
Kamala Harris having a seven out of 10 chance of winning the election if it were held today seems pretty reasonable at this point. Nate Silver this week has those probabilities almost exactly backward, with Trump having about a seven out of 10 chance of winning. On the other hand, I spent some time this afternoon listening to Christopher Bouzy on Spoutible, revealing his new electoral map. That one seems wildly optimistic in Harris’s direction.
But both of those guys are trying, something more robust than a polls-only estimate. They’re trying to factor in other information, which is more subjective. That might explain why these two projections differ so strongly. The two approaches should theoretically converge as we get closer to election day. In the meantime, I should take a dive into their reasoning to see if I can assess it. Right now I’m comfortable being in the middle.
Yeah, it’s taken me a while to get this one out, again. Sorry. It’s been tricky settling back into the academic year.
Starting this week I will download polling data on Fridays and, with luck, will have a post for you on Saturday. Look for our next update on or around the 14th.
That thing about a week being an eternity in politics has never seemed more true. Donald Trump’s visit to Arlington National Cemetery was a bit more than a week ago, but that’s still within the data collection for this update. It’s been a crazy week or so.
The State of the Race
One thing that surprised me was Nate Silver’s announcement on Thursday that according to his model, Donald Trump had about a 60% chance of winning the election. Silver is doing something fundamentally different than I’m doing here. He’s trying to bring fundamentals and other factors into his probabilities while I’m just looking at poll numbers.
I just do not see it. And whereas good poll numbers are based in fact, I worry that trying to factor in other fundamentals doesn’t. A lot of it, I believe, is guesswork at best and wishful thinking (or existential terror) at worst.
Let’s look at what happened over the past few days over at electoral-vote.com. On Thursday Pennsylvania shifted from barely Democratic to toss-up. Friday’s map had Pennsylvania back at barely Democratic, while Georgia moved from barely Democratic to toss-up and North Carolina moved from barely Republican to toss-up. Yesterday, Texas moved from leans Republican to barely Republican. That sounds like a big deal until you dig into the data. In this case, the margin shrank from five points to four. It is, to paraphrase the Bard, much ado about very little. The website 270 to Win moved Texas and Florida from red to toss-up on Friday. Here’s their “Polls Only” Map.
If this is correct there’s a lot of open ground where either side can grow. Are Trump’s chances of victory improving? That’s harder to say.
Results:
I was pondering a change in methodology last week. I’m only making one change. I’m now reaching back 15 days to gather my polls rather than 10. Some of the polls on Electoral-Vote.com collect data for a month. Since the date on EV’s polls is the midpoint of the data collection, those would never get included with any window shorter than 15 days.
This will also keep more polls in the data set and reduce the chance that one extreme or outlier poll will skew the data.
As usual, we entered the polling data into our model and ran 40,000 simulated elections. Here’s what we get.
More states are showing as “Toss Up” than our recent updates, but light red, light blue, and taupe are very close together; this is not a dramatic change.
The results of the simulations tell us that the probability of Harris winning if the election were held today sits at 60% while Trump’s likelihood of victory is about 39%. One percent of the simulations ate ties.
This is where our results have been for a while, Harris still has a slight lead and the odds of her winning remain at about 3 to 2. But wait.
Trends:
I shifted methods so I’m not going to list the week-to-week changes. In the Electoral-Vote.com data, there’s some slight tightening in the race as evidenced by the larger number of toss-up states. Since I collected this data there was Nate Silver’s election probability, Trump’s pulled ahead on at least one betting site and Trump led the latest NYTimes/Siena College poll. Contrarily Harris is ahead in the FiveThirtyEight analysis with a 54% chance of victory.
We might be looking at a 50/50 race in out next update, but from our vantage point, the race as a whole seems stubbornly stable. In our model Harris’s advantage is driven by how many more electoral votes remain in the “Strongly Democratic” column vs. it’s “Strongly Republican” counterpart. Want to move our numbers? Get us a fresh poll in Indiana or Oregon depending on which side you’d like to help.
Last Words
I looked at something a little different this week and it’s interesting. While most of our analysis seems centered on the close races, let’s look at the ends of the red/blue spectrum. I ran a set of 1000 simulations and looked at the biggest landslides. The best result for the Republicans was a victory of 353 EVs to 185. The biggest win for the Democrats was 398 to 140. The maps for these might look something like this.
Neither of these are are going to happen; we won’t get close to either without a systematic polling error. Still, these look a lot more reasonable in the light of 270-to-Win’s polls only map; if you assume all the Toss Ups fall in one direction you get a Democratic victory of 390 to 148 or a Republican victory of 328 to 210. Stay tuned.
Quicker than usual; I have to be ready to Teach on Monday. There are actually two sets of results here. I’ll explain.
Results for 28 August 2024:
As usual, we collected data on Wednesday. We’re in virtually the same place as we were last week. Here Harris wins about 62% of the simulations and Trump takes about 37%. The likelihood of a tie is still at about 1%. Let’s look at the state shifts.
State
Change
Arizona
Barely Democratic to Barely Republican
Maine AL
Leaning Democratic to Strongly Democratic
Maine 2nd
Barely Republican to Leaning Democratic
North Carolina
Barely Democratic to Toss Up
Wisconsin
Toss Up to Leaning Democratic
There is more dancing of the results that live inside the margin of error. The Maine shifts are the most significant here and that’s why the probability barely moved even though Trump pulled ahead with the electoral count. The light blue, light red, and tan states all have probabilities at or near 50/50; those will bounce back and forth in the simulations but the dark blue and the dark red? Those stay on one side for the majority of the trials. If something moves into one of those categories we’re likely to see it.
So, we’re holding steady with the odds of a Harris victory sitting at 3 to 2; there’s no real evidence of a bump from the Democratic convention. Globally the numbers still seem to be trending in Harris’s direction.
Results for 29 August 2024:
Several polls that showed a movement towards Harris in the swing states arrived on 29 August. Here are the results from that next day. I won’t give these results their own write-up because I played with the parameters; there are no apples-to-apples comparisons.
Last Words
These results are making me think about my methodology; I’d like to tamp down the variance and I’m not sure the colors are giving the best indication of the state of the race. Still, I don’t want to switch things up too many times.
So, I’m pondering. I may just let the status quo ride and make changes for 2028. If I make more alterations I’ll use them until Election Day. My plan is to have everything sorted by Wednesday.
This is what the stock market calls a “correction.” Harris Still Favored
I’m watching night 3 of the Democratic National Convention and Oprah just exited the stage. It was electric; the crowd was as energized as it has been all through the convention. Today we’re looking at a set of data that was collected almost entirely before the convention.
The State of the Race
The slowdown in the campaigning is over and the DNC seems to be sucking up all the air in the election. Well, maybe it’s just sucking up all of my attention. (Boy, that was just a hell of a response for Mayor Pete.) The excitement in the Arena is palpable and infectious. There was little to no bounce coming out of the RNC. I don’t think the same will be true of the DNC.
Trump and Vance are on the campaign trail, and Trump seems more active than last week, but I don’t know if it’s enough. More on that after the analysis.
Results:
A minor change in the methodology; with this update, I’ve separated out the congressional districts in Maine and Nebraska. Those are modeled separately and this will make the projections a bit more accurate. Since Electoral-Vote.com doesn’t have that data I’ll be taking it from Projects.FiveThirtyEight.com. Plus the first and third districts in Nebraska needed a smidgen of algebra because I only had separate polling on District 2. Aside from that, as always, an explanation of how the map was created and our scheme for finding our polling averages can be found here: Methodology.
You probably know how this goes by now. We entered the polling data into our model and ran 40,000 simulated elections. If the election were held today, Vice President Harris would have roughly a 62% chance of winning while Donald Trump would win about 37% of the time. The likelihood of an Electoral College tie is still approximately 1%.
This is a “polls only” approximation and so it’s sensitive to changes in polling numbers. That leads to some volatility. For example, let’s look at Virginia which moved from “Leaning Democratic” to “Barely Democratic.” Here’s what that looks like in their data.
That is not a dramatic change, we’re looking mostly at the result normal of statistical variation.
Given this data, Harris still leads and the odds of her winning the election are about 3 to 2.
Trends:
The averages have shifted back in Trump’s direction and it’s put the odds for Harris and Trump back to where they were two weeks ago. Here are the changes from last week.
State
Change
Georgia
Toss Up to Leaning Democratic
Michigan
Barely Democratic to Toss Up
Nevada
Barely Democratic to Barely Republican
North Carolina
Toss Up to Barely Democratic
Pennsylvania
Leaning Democratic to Toss Up
Virginia
Leaning Democratic to Barely Democratic
As I mentioned above most of these look like what happens with results within the margin of error. The possible exception there is Georgia where the new poll looks a lot different from the previous one. My best guess is that this is merely a more accurate description of the state of the race than a rightward shift but it could be either. More polling will determine that. It turns out that one consequence of my choice of using a ten-day window for poll numbers is some volatility as we’re frequently replacing a single poll with a different single poll. I hope we get more state polls as election day draws closer; that will tamp down the variation.
The odds of a Harris winning sitting at 3 to 2 seems more reasonable than the 3 to 1 we found last week.
Last Words
I’m now writing on Thursday Morning. The end of Night 3 at the DNC was nearly flawless. Walz gave a powerful “pep talk” that received what might have been the best crowd response of the day. It was also steeped in Americana. A high school football coach who loves his family, helps his neighbors, and helped win a state championship surely has appeal to voters all across the political spectrum. And watching his family was heart-warming. Trying to reconcile that with a “soulless communist who will destroy America” just does not compute.
Neil Young’s “Keep on Rocking in the Free World” is a perfect song to end the evening.
As I mentioned, I haven’t seen much coverage of the Republican campaign. I’ve seen a tiny rally featuring Vance, part of a small, weird, appearance by Trump in Howell, Michigan, and an AI-generated image implying that Taylor Swift is endorsing Trump. In addition, a Trump staffer released a now-deleted video of Trump backed by Beyoncé’s song “Freedom,” Trump had claimed that he is better looking than Kamala Harris and that there’s no way Harris’s acceptance speech will get better ratings than his speech to the RNC. Trump’s interest in crowd sizes remains an ongoing theme. Maybe I’ve seen more than I thought.
Let’s take those one at a time.
The Vance rally just seems like more of the same.
In his appearance in Howell, Michigan Trump seemed lethargic. If any other candidate had made that speech Trump would have been all over them for being “low energy.” Also, “Kamala crime wave?” Seriously?
I’m pretty sure the Taylor Swift thing was a misstep.
I’m certain using Beyoncé’s “Freedom” was a misstep. There’s already a cease and desist order. A lawsuit will probably follow.
“I’m better looking than Kamala Harris” is just sad.
And bragging about the ratings of his acceptance speech is just dumb. There will be objective evidence tomorrow and my money here is on the new kid. If Trump’s right this is a non-story. If he’s wrong it’s an embarrassment. There’s no upside.
Trump’s obsession with crowd sizes is getting funny. The best example of that is probably Walz and Harris appearing remotely to the DNC after the roll call vote from the very same venue that hosted the RNC. Both venues were packed and there was no footage of anyone leaving early. If nothing else this was some world-class trolling.
Trump had a pretty effective line of attack against President Biden, but it’s now been a month since the president dropped out. The Trump Campaign still does not have a coherent strategy to run against Harris. Falsely calling her a communist or blaming her for a nonexistent crime wave might play to his base but it won’t play with independents and it won’t bring any new voters to his cause. We’ve seen it all before.
The campaign seems to have slowed down somewhat while the Democrats gear up for their convention. Vice President Harris and President Biden will appear together today (8/15) in Maryland while Governor Walz is on his own tour of the Northeast. JD Vance is in Pennsylvania today while yet another controversial quote has surfaced.
Donald Trump has been a bit more active than he had been. This week we’ve seen his interview with Elon Musk on X and a last-minute rally in North Carolina which was supposed to be focused on the economy. The economic content was sparse while Trump frequently veered off-topic and attacked his opponents.
Results:
An explanation of how the map was created and our scheme for finding our polling averages and can be found here: Methodology.
As usual, we entered the polling data into our model and ran 40,000 simulated elections. If the election were held today, it appears Vice President Harris would have about a 74% chance of winning while Donald Trump would win about 25% of the time. The likelyhood of an Electoral College tie is roughly 1%.
Remember that this is an estimate and it is only based on the current polling numbers. As we’ve seen these can change dramatically over three weeks; and we’re nearly three months from the election.
Given this data, Harris leads and the odds of her winning could be as high as 3 to 1.
Trends:
The race continues to move in Harris’s direction. This is evident if we look at the movements of the state polls between last week and this. There’s one exception to the trend;
Michigan changed from Strongly Democratic to Barely Democratic. This was expected; the polling average last week was based on a single poll that was a clear outlier. That poll, which had Harris up by ten fell out of the average was replaced by two more typical results.
The other shifts tell a consistent story.
Texas: Strongly Republican to Leans Republican
North Carolina: Barely Republican to Toss Up
Arizona: Barely Republican to Barely Democratic
Pennsylvania: Toss Up to Leans Democratic
These all show movement toward Harris. In addition, within the last week, Harris is now leading:
in national popular vote polls and polling averages,
in states with a total of more than 270 electoral votes,
on forecasting sites like 538 and The Cook Political Report, and
on betting sites like Polymarket.
The comparative attendance and enthusiasm at Democratic vs. Republican Rallies also speak in Harris’s favor.
The momentum remains on Harris’s side.
Last Words
The Harris campaign has consolidated its lead over the last week. It’s no surprise; just over three weeks ago most voters believed that the presumptive nominees of both major political parties were too old to effectively serve as president. The voters wanted a new candidate in the race. With President Biden’s decision to withdraw his candidacy, they got one. The political landscape shifted and the Democrats are capitalizing on that by running an effective, aggressive, and positive campaign. Likely, they will further strengthen their position throughout their convention. But conventional wisdom would then suggest that things will shift back toward being competitive as the campaign begins in earnest and Harris and Walz have to add some specifics to their policy proposals.
But maybe not.
Donald Trump spent months attacking President Biden and implying he should withdraw from the race. He should have been prepared when it happened. But he wasn’t.
At the RNC, with the possibility of Biden’s withdrawal growing more likely, Trump could have picked a running mate that could bring more voters into their base. But he didn’t.
In the aftermath of an assassination attempt, Trump could have changed tactics, eschewed political violence, and become a candidate aiming to unite the nation. But he couldn’t.
Trump could have gone on the campaign trail to court voters and make the case for the Republican ticket every day since 21 July. But he wouldn’t.
Instead, he picked a running mate who appealed to the extreme edge of his base and who is alienating voters, childless cat ladies, and post-menopausal females.
And he didn’t turn away from political violence. When he mentioned Paul Pelosi at the RNC he pantomimed a hammer. “Bam, bam, bam!”
And there’s nothing new in his rhetoric. He hasn’t even bothered to change his talking points. the “Worst President in American History,” became the “Worst Vice President” and “Lyin’ Joe Biden” has turned into “Lyin’ Kamala Harris.” Simplistic.
And the lies are all the same no matter what Trump wants to tell us. The 2020 Election wasn’t stolen. Trump didn’t have the biggest inaugural crowd ever. He wasn’t the best President for African Americans since Abraham Lincoln. We are actually better off than we were four years ago. The list goes on.
This election could still go either way, but it’s getting close to the point where it will take something as dramatic as a major party candidate withdrawing from the election for that to happen. But it’s getting late to try that; ballots are closing.
If Donald Trump doesn’t get back on the campaign trail and give the country something more than the same old grievances, the same old falsehoods, and the same old show this election could be a rout. We’re tired of it.
Since our last update, the Democratic Ticket has been campaigning across the country working to extend their momentum from the past two weeks. The big news there is the unveiling of Tim Walz as Harris’s running mate. They’ve been touring the swing states since the announcement and drawing large enthusiastic crowds.
JD Vance has been following them across the country trying to draw comparisons between the two campaigns. It’s been lackluster. The comparison is not helping the Republicans.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump has been mostly absent from the campaign trail; with only one sparsely attended rally in Montana and a press conference. I haven’t watched the press conference yet so I’ll reserve comments for now. The Trump Campaign holding a rally in Montana is mystifying. That’s a move you make when you’re on a clear path to victory and you can afford to spend resources on a Senate seat. His campaign has bigger issues. Was it about trying to get a rally with good attendance for a visual to counter those coming out of the Harris campaign? A positive event to get Trump back on the trail?
The narrative around the debates is mystifying as well. Trump began making up a possible debate on Fox News even before he debated President Biden. But the waffling, then canceling the debate, then insisting on the made-up Fox News debate, and finally canceling again all made Trump look frightened. Making up another debate and then insisting on three debates is a weird thing to do and is too little, too late.
The Harris/Walz tour of the swing states wraps up Saturday in Nevada.
Results:
Once again we entered the polling data into our model and ran 40,000 simulated elections. If the election were held today, it looks like Donald Trump would have about a 35% chance of winning with Vice President Harris winning about 64% of the time. The remaining 1% were Electoral College ties.
Again, I would emphasize that this is an estimate. There weren’t many state polls in the last week and using our scheme had an interesting effect: it turned out that every state ‘average’ was determined by a single poll.
This had its greatest effect in Michigan as the one poll used there is probably an outlier (Harris led by 11), which would make the probability of a Harris victory an overestimate.
Given this data, Harris is in the lead and the odds of her winning the election could be as good as 3 to 2.
Our scheme for finding our polling averages and creating the map can be found here: Methodology.
Trends:
Trump was favored to win in our 21 July probability, and Harris pulled roughly even with him in our 31 July estimate. Now, for the moment, it’s safe to say that Harris has an edge. Strictly looking at the probabilities generated from the models, Harris’s probability of winning the election is roughly where Trump’s was on 21 July, between 63 and 64%. This is a complete turnaround in just under three weeks.
But that’s not the only evidence. Other predictive sites are showing similar results. Nate Silver now has Harris favored to win both the popular vote and the Electoral College. The New York Times/Siena College Poll released this morning has Harris leading Trump by 4 points in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. The Cook Political Report has reclassified the race in Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada from “Lean Republican” to “Toss Up.”
The momentum remains on Harris’s side.
Last Words
It’s beginning to look like the campaign is the Democrats’ to lose. They have been able to dominate the news cycle and generate enthusiasm since the Republican Convention with President Biden’s withdrawal, followed by Harris introducing herself, the party unifying behind her, and then the announcement of Walz as Harris’s running mate. This could easily continue as the Democratic Convention will lead to hearings about Trump’s January 6th Election Interference Case which will bring us into early voting.
The Trump Campaign still seems unable to find its footing. They continue to throw whatever they can against the Democrats but nothing yet has really stuck outside of their MAGA base. With Vance drawing tiny crowds and Trump largely off the campaign trail it’s hard to see how they can turn this around. Right now it’s easy to find headlines like “Trump Campaign Bleeding Support…” or “Is Trump ‘Losing His Marbles.’“
Still, this election could go either way. Even if the probability of Trump winning the election is really at 35% (and many sites have it higher) that’s still about 10% better than his chances of winning the 2016 election. In that election, he exceeded expectations at every turn. While the Republican Party’s overconfidence in July is partly responsible for the current state of the election other overconfidence could still shake things up dramatically.
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