Silver Bulletin 2024 presidential election forecast
All the numbers for Trump vs. Harris.
🕒 Last update: 2:45 p.m., Tuesday, October 22. Strong day of state polling for Trump, with leads in high-quality polls of Georgia and Nevada — where early voting numbers also look promising for Republicans. Trump has steadily improved in our forecast over the past two weeks, but the model is mostly sticking to the view that these are incremental shifts rather than a sea change and the race remains highly competitive.
Another interesting tidbit: a new New York poll shows Harris leading in the Empire State by 19 points, a considerably larger lead than before. In a weird way, that’s bad news for Harris since it cuts against the notion that New York, where Democrats have far more votes than they need but which moved strongly to the right in 2022, could be a source of a diminishing Electoral College advantage. There’s now a 27 percent chance that Harris wins the popular vote but loses the Electoral College, a new high.
Let’s cut to the chase: So, who’s gonna win the election?
Well, honestly, we don’t know — but we can give you our best probabilistic guess. This is the landing page for the 2024 Silver Bulletin presidential election forecast. It will always contain the most recent data from the model.1
The model is the direct descendant of the f/k/a FiveThirtyEight election forecast2 and the methodology is largely the same, other than removing COVID-19 provisions introduced for 2020. Other changes from 2020 are documented here. And an archive of the Biden-Trump forecast can be found here.
The polls: who’s ahead right now?
The Silver Bulletin polling averages are a little fancy. They adjust for whether polls are conducted among registered or likely voters and house effects. They weight more reliable polls more heavily. And they use national polls to make inferences about state polls and vice versa. It requires a few extra CPU cycles — but the reward is a more stable average that doesn’t get psyched out by outliers.
The forecast: so you’re telling me there’s a chance?
Needless to say, stranger things have happened than a candidate who was behind in the polls winning. And in America’s polarized political climate, most elections are close and a candidate is rarely out of the running. So here is how our model translates polls and the other inputs it uses into probabilities in the Electoral College and the popular vote in every state — plus some nightmare scenarios like a repeat of the 2000 Florida recount. (It’s more likely than you might think, alas.) We’re not afraid of playing the percentages here — even to the decimal place.