By Dave Andrusko
So, can pro-abortion Vice President Kamala Harris be ever-so-slightly ahead of former President Donald Trump in both national polls and “battleground” states and still be in deep trouble? Let’s see.
According to Isaac Schorr, here’s what elections analyst and hugely influential FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver thinks as of yesterday. Remember, Silver is not talking about the national poll but rather the predicted electoral college results:
He believes that former President and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is the slight favorite to defeat Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris this November going into Labor Day weekend and the home stretch of the campaign.
The model update suggests that Trump has a 52.4% chance of winning the Electoral College while Harris has a 47.3% chance of prevailing, making Trump the favorite in Silver’s model for the first time since August 3.
According to Silver, the “one big reason” for Trump’s advantage is Pennsylvania, which he identified as “the tipping-point state more than one-third of the time” in his model “and where it’s been quite a while since we’ve seen a poll showing Harris leading (including two new polls today).”
A late addition as of 1:00 pm this afternoon from Silver:
But it was a mixed bag for both candidates. Kamala Harris’s lead in national polls shrunk from 3.8 points to 3.3 — although with a big exception in Michigan, she had a pretty good day in state polls. The model is making a convention bounce adjustment to Harris’s numbers; if she holds her current standing for another week or two, she’ll begin to move up in the forecast again. Still, the tight polls in Pennsylvania are a worry for the vice president.
What change did he find in Michigan? Harris’s lead had sunk by l.3%. She now leads 48.4% to Trump’s 46.2%. [is the one in 1.3% a 1 or an i?]
On the other hand, a new USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll finds Harris up by 5 points–48%-43% [], according to Susan Page, Savannah Kuchar, and Sudiksha Kochi. The poll of 1,000 likely voters was taken by landline and cellphone Sunday through Wednesday.