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Silver Bulletin 2024 presidential election forecast

www.natesilver.net

Silver Bulletin 2024 presidential election forecast

All the numbers for Trump vs. Harris.

Nate Silver
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Eli McKown-Dawson
Nov 01, 2024
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Silver Bulletin 2024 presidential election forecast

www.natesilver.net
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🕒 Last update: 3:30 p.m., Friday, November 1. We’re running our PM update relatively early today, but the topline Electoral College numbers are unchanged down to the decimal point. The most interesting survey of the afternoon is a Susquehanna poll showing Trump up 6 points in Nevada — where he now leads by 0.6 points in our average — but with a sample size of just 400 voters and Nevada unlikely to be the tipping-point state, it didn’t influence the model much.

10:15 a.m., Friday, November 1. Good update for Harris with some strong polling for her in the Blue Wall states. Not much sign of a last-minute swing in the race. We are likely locked into something roughly in the toss-up range, unless the last round of NYT/Siena polls weigh strongly toward one side. We’ll run another update in the afternoon if there’s a significant amount of polling.

Let’s cut to the chase: So, who’s gonna win the election?

Well, honestly, we don’t know — but we can give you our best probabilistic guess. This is the landing page for the 2024 Silver Bulletin presidential election forecast. It will always contain the most recent data from the model.1

The model is the direct descendant of the f/k/a FiveThirtyEight election forecast2 and the methodology is largely the same, other than removing COVID-19 provisions introduced for 2020. Other changes from 2020 are documented here. And an archive of the Biden-Trump forecast can be found here.

The polls: who’s ahead right now?

The Silver Bulletin polling averages are a little fancy. They adjust for whether polls are conducted among registered or likely voters and house effects. They weight more reliable polls more heavily. And they use national polls to make inferences about state polls and vice versa. It requires a few extra CPU cycles — but the reward is a more stable average that doesn’t get psyched out by outliers.

The forecast: so you’re telling me there’s a chance?

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. So here is how our model translates polls and the other inputs it uses into probabilities in the Electoral College and the popular vote in every state — plus some nightmare scenarios like a repeat of the 2000 Florida recount. (It’s more likely than you might think, alas.) We’re not afraid of playing the percentages here — even to the decimal place.

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