A liberal pollster’s projection is eliciting reactions after he said the winner of the upcoming presidential US election will have a 63 percent electoral college victory
Nate Silver, places the Republican candidate, Donald Trump’s chances of winning the electoral college vote at 63.8 percent, compared to 36 percent for Harris.
Silver’s modelling, published on his blog Silver Bulletin, also places Trump ahead in all of the major swing states.
Silver predicts that there’ll be 312 electoral college votes for Trump versus 226 for Harris in a no-toss-up map.
The figure is a massive upswing on the 227 electoral college votes Trump secured against Biden in 2020 and even an improvement on his victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016 when he romped to the White House with 304 electoral college votes.
Silver’s estimation for the popular vote still has Harris ahead, with her chances of securing the popular vote at 56 percent compared to Trump’s 44 percent.
But his margins are tiny, with Harris narrowly edging up on Trump with estimated 49.8 percent of the popular vote versus 49.1 percent for the Republican nominee.
Up until August 29, the date of her CNN interview alongside her running mate Tim Walz, Silver had been forecasting a Harris victory.
But since then, Trump has steadily been gaining the advantage in his predictions and is now favored to win by the widest margin in several months.
His prediction comes as a New York Times/Siena College poll released two days ahead of their debate showdown on Tuesday put Trump 1 percent ahead of the vice president – 48 percent to 47 percent – within the survey’s 3-point margin of error.
The good news for Harris is that there’s a debate on Tuesday, and if she turns in a strong performance, nobody is going to care so much about the Times poll,’ Silver said.’A relatively high percentage of voters in the NYT poll said they didn’t know what Harris stood for, which means there’s room for these numbers to move. ‘But they could move in either direction as Team Trump circulates sound bites and video clips.’ Kamala and Trump are due to face off in Philadelphia on Tuesday.
63% chance of winning doesn’t mean winning with 63% of the EC vote.