Nate Silver: Trump slightly ahead of Harris heading into Labor Day weekend

Pollster Nate Silver’s election forecast now has former President Trump slightly ahead of Vice President Harris heading into Labor Day weekend. 

While Harris is beating the former president by 3.8 points based on the updated Silver Bulletin’s national polling tracker, the vice president’s chance of winning the Electoral College has dipped.

Silver’s forecast has Trump with a 52.4 percent chance of winning the Electoral College, about 5 points higher than Harris’s 47.3 percent. 

“Some of this is because of the convention bounce adjustment that the model applies to polls that were conducted during or after the [Democratic National Convention],” Silver wrote Thursday. “It assumes Harris’s polls are somewhat inflated right now, in other words — just as it assumed Trump’s numbers were inflated after the [Republican National Convention].” 

Silver wrote that if Harris is able to maintain her current standing for a “couple” more weeks, “she’ll begin to track up again in our forecast as the model will become more confident that she’s out of the convention bounce period.” 

A Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll, released Thursday, had Harris leading Trump by an average of 2 points across seven battleground states. When the poll was restricted to likely voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, she was up by 1 point, within the poll’s margin of error.

And a new survey from Emerson College Polling and The Hill, released Thursday morning, found that Trump and Harris are essentially tied in each of the battleground states.

Since she replaced President Biden as the party’s presidential nominee, Harris has closed the polling gap with the former president, erasing the lead Trump had while he campaigned against the incumbent president. 

A Decision Desk HQ/The Hill aggregate of polls currently has Harris at 49 percent, nearly 4 points higher than Trump’s 45.1 percent.