FINAL Silver Bulletin 2024 presidential election forecast
All the numbers for Trump vs. Harris.
🕒 Last and final update: 12:30 a.m., Tuesday, November 5. Happy Election Day! At exactly midnight on Tuesday, we ran our simulation model for the final time in this election cycle. Out of 80,000 simulations, Kamala Harris won in 40,012 (50.015%) cases. She did not win in 39,988 simulations (49.985%). Of those, 39,718 were outright wins for Donald Trump and the remainder (270 simulations) were exact 269-269 Electoral College ties: these ties are likely to eventually result in Trump wins in the U.S. House of Representatives.
I’m not quite sure what to say about this, but we’ll have a newsletter out for you later tonight/this morning and link to it here once it’s ready. Update: it’s published.
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.