Polling guru Nate Silver has revealed his most recent prediction ahead of the Tuesday presidential election — suggesting the outcome will almost be a coin flip.
Silver gave GOP candidate and former President Donald Trump a 51.5 percent chance to win the electoral college. In comparison, his Democratic opponent and Vice President Kamala Harris had a 48.1 percent chance of victory.
The pollster left Five Thirty-Eight in 2023 and took his forecasting model with him. He made his latest prediction on his Substack blog, the Silver Bulletin.
Silver has Trump as the slight favorite despite VP Harris being ahead in his aggregation of public polls by only under a percentage point.
“NYT swing state polls good for Harris but not great. Morning Consult swing state polls good for Trump but not great,” wrote Silver on X Sunday morning. “It’s a pure toss-up.”
Silver first referred to a final poll conducted by The New York Times that showed Donald Trump running behind Harris in four battleground states: Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina, and Nevada.
The poll additionally showed President Trump with a lead in Arizona, while the two were tied in Pennsylvania and Michigan.
Silver mentioned that the Morning Consult poll’s results were a bit kinder to Trump.
Trump led Harris by two points in both North Carolina and Georgia. Morning Consult also found three states in a dead heat: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Arizona.
Iowa pollster predicts the state will go to Harris
Additionally, Silver said the bombshell poll from Ann Selzer, which showed the vice president beating Trump by three points in Iowa, “probably won’t matter” in deciding the electoral college winner.
However, Silver wasn’t too quick to dismiss the results as meaningless, stating that Harris supporters were right to have a strong reaction.
“I think Harris voters are reasonable in rejoicing over the Selzer survey,” wrote Silver.
“At the very least, it clinches the case that there will be plenty of numbers from high-quality pollsters in the final batch of polls that support a Harris victory — along with roughly as many that imply a Trump win,” continued Silver.
“If Trump had ‘momentum’ in October, it has now petered out in November. And we will very likely go into Tuesday night with the race being truly a toss-up, not leaning or tilting toward Trump.”
Over decades of conducting the Des Moines Register polls, Selzer has built a reputation as “the best pollster in politics” and “Iowa’s Polling Queen.”
The former president blasted the survey, calling Selzer a “Trump hater” and insisting farmers in Iowa “love” him.
“All polls, except for one heavily skewed toward the Democrats by a Trump hater who called it totally wrong the last time, have me up, BY A LOT,” he vented on Truth Social.
“We don’t have as much data as we might like about why this is happening,” said Selzer to MSNBC’s “The Weekend.”
“But our consensus from the reporters who work this beat is that the abortion ban went into effect this past summer…I think it has gotten people interested in voting.”
Iowa hasn’t voted for a Democratic candidate in the presidential election since Barack Obama in 2012 and was written off by Kamala Harris’s campaign as an easy Republican victory.
Like the polls, betting markets have also tightened recently due to the favorable Iowa poll for VP Harris.
As recently as Halloween, around 60 percent of bettors on platforms like Kalshi, Predictit, and Polymarket were convinced Trump would be victorious.
Trump’s odds are now no better than 54 percent on all three websites. In fact, VP Harris is the 56 to 48 percent favorite on Predictit.
The final DailyMail.com/J.L. Before Election Day, the partners’ national poll showed that Trump passed Harris by three percentage points nationwide.
The polls of 1,000 likely voters, which have a margin of error of minus or plus 3.1 percent, show Trump trending up, with 49 percent support compared to Harris’s 46 percent.
