Nate Silver: Trump-Harris race likely to remain toss-up until election

Pollster Nate Silver said in his latest election forecast that the White House race between former President Trump and Vice President Harris is likely to remain a toss-up until Election Day, now less than a month away.

“I’ve never seen an election in which the forecast spent more time in the vicinity of 50/50, and I probably never will,” Silver wrote in his column published Tuesday. 

He argued that there were a few instances where it seemed like the election was swinging in one direction, “but they proved to be false starts.” 

Silver pointed to when Harris replaced President Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket in late July and saw her poll numbers surge — a boost that did not last long, as “polls began declining after her convention when typically, this is one of the best periods of polling for a candidate.” 

The veteran pollster also said there was a time when the election forecast indicated the race was shifting toward Trump.

Silver, the founder of ABC’s FiveThirtyEight, wrote that following the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Harris began to lose ground in some high-quality national polls, experienced some economic “headwinds” and saw the “lingering effects of the model’s convention bounce adjustment.”  

“The debate came at this moment, however — and Harris won and reestablished what’s been a consistent lead of about 3 points in national polls — close enough where the Electoral College is roughly 50/50 or maybe a slight Harris edge,” he wrote in the column. 

The pollster suggested that while a news event could move the needle in either direction before Nov. 5, it is highly unlikely as the number of undecided voters continues to decrease.

“With extremely few undecided voters (Harris and Trump combine for 95.5 percent of the vote in our national average and third parties typically get another 1 or 2 percent) there just aren’t enough votes in play to really move the needle,” Silver wrote. “And polls simply aren’t accurate enough to provide for much more confidence than that.”

“This is where the sports analogies fail too: in elections, the ‘final score” (the last polling average before Election Day) isn’t always correct,'” he added.

Harris garnered a 3-point lead, 49 percent to 46 percent, over the ex-president in the latest national poll from The New York Times and Siena College, released on Tuesday.

In The Hill, Decision Desk HQ’s polling aggregate, the vice president currently has a 3.3 percent lead over Trump, 49.8 percent to 46.5 percent, nationally.