Silver Bulletin 2024 presidential election forecast

All the numbers for Trump vs. Harris.

🕒 Last update: 10:45 a.m., Sunday, November 3. Just two days to go! A lot of polling out in the morning, but it’s all fairly consistent with our previous forecast. A final set of NYT/Siena swing state polls was good for Kamala Harris but not great — for instance, in showing Pennsylvania as a tie, a race that previous NYT polls had shown as leaning toward Harris. However, she got a mediocre set of state numbers from Morning Consult, considering it’s generally been one of her better pollsters. And our national polling average tightened even further to Harris +0.9, though the model doesn’t care much about national polls at this stage.

So, there was nothing as exciting as the Des Moines Register poll last night that showed Harris leading in Iowa—we have a lot of thoughts about that one. Instead, it’s all in line with a race that’s really and truly close to 50/50. We’ll very likely have another update in the PM.

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.