Nate Silver’s latest election forecast shows two key swing states have shifted in former President Donald Trump‘s favor over the past week, although Vice President Kamala Harris remains the favorite to win in November.
Trump received a string of positive polls across Pennsylvania and Michigan in the final days of September, the states that Silver says have the biggest chance of tipping the election results this fall.
In Pennsylvania, the former president was found leading the race by 2.9 percentage points (51 percent to 48.1 percent) among likely voters in a survey conducted between September 20 and 25 by AtlasIntel, which FiveThirtyEight ranks as one of America’s top 25 pollsters in the 2024 election.
Similarly, in a poll conducted between September 26 and 29 by the conservative pollster Trafalgar Group, Trump was up by 2 percentage points (48 percent to 45 percent) on Harris among likely voters in Pennsylvania.
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In Michigan, a separate poll from AtlasIntel also handed Trump a win, finding him ahead by 3.4 percentage points (50.6 percent to 47.2 percent) among likely voters in a head-to-head race against Harris. Overall, Silver’s forecast on Monday found that Trump improved by 0.7 percentage points in Pennsylvania and 0.4 percentage points in Michigan over the past week.
Harris still leads in both battleground states on average, although Silver noted that there is a clear gap between state polling and the vice president’s overall lead across national polls. While Harris is up 3.2 points on Trump as of Monday, per Silver’s tracking, she is only ahead by 1.2 points in Pennsylvania on average. Similarly, in Michigan, Harris is up by 1.8 points.
Silver noted in Monday’s edition of the Silver Bulletin that the gap is a sign that the Electoral College “is still a big net disadvantage for Democrats.” Nevertheless, Silver’s model still favors Harris to win the necessary 270 electoral votes in November, giving her a 55.1 percent chance of victory this fall. In comparison, as of Monday, Trump was given a 44.7 percent chance of winning a second term in the White House.
Harris also maintains a slight lead across national polls per FiveThirtyEight’s tracking, which finds the vice president up 48.5 percent to 45.7 percent on average as of Monday afternoon. With less than 40 days until Election Day, the race is much too close to call a clear winner.
The 2024 race is set up to be one of the closest presidential races in U.S. history, and experts are closely watching the contests in seven states in the final weeks, although as FiveThirtyEight’s Geoffrey Skelley wrote in a report on Monday, the results in November will likely eventually come down to a single “tipping-point” state: Pennsylvania.
“Looking at 538’s forecast, the most likely tipping-point state across all scenarios for the 2024 election is Pennsylvania,” Skelley wrote. “In 18 out of 100 cases, the Keystone State provides the winning electoral votes for either Harris or Trump.”
Silver also predicts Pennsylvania has the highest chance—31 percent—of tipping the election.
