Eric Gay/AP/AAP
by Adrian Beaumont, The University of Melbourne
The United States presidential election will be held on November 5. In analyst Nate Silver’s aggregate of national polls, Democrat Kamala Harris leads Republican Donald Trump by 48.6–47.4, a gain for Trump since last Wednesday, when Harris led by 48.8–47.2. Harris’ national lead peaked on October 2, when she led by 49.4–45.9.
The US president isn’t elected by the national popular vote, but by the Electoral College, in which each state receives electoral votes equal to its federal House seats (population based) and senators (always two). Almost all states award their electoral votes as winner-takes-all, and it takes 270 electoral votes to win (out of 538 total).
Relative to the national popular vote, the Electoral College is biased to Trump, with Harris needing at least a two-point popular vote win to be the narrow Electoral College favorite in Silver’s model.
In Silver’s poll averages, Trump is now 0.3% ahead in Pennsylvania (19 electoral votes), which was tied last Wednesday. He leads in North Carolina (16) and Georgia (16) by 1.3–1.4 points and in Arizona (11) by 2.1 points. Harris leads in Michigan (15 electoral votes) by 0.7 points and in Wisconsin (ten) by 0.5 points. In Nevada (six), it’s tied.
If the election results exactly reflect the current polls, Trump would win the Electoral College by 281–251 with Nevada’s six electoral votes undecided.
The good news for Harris is that state polls haven’t moved to Trump as much as national polls in the last two weeks. If Harris regains the lead in Pennsylvania, she will probably win. But Harris would likely be better placed in Pennsylvania now if she had made the popular Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro her running mate.
Silver’s model now gives Trump a 53% chance to win the Electoral College, unchanged from last Wednesday. While Trump is barely ahead, it’s still effectively a 50–50 coin flip. There’s a 26% chance that Harris wins the popular vote but loses the Electoral College. The FiveThirtyEight forecast gives Trump a 54% win probability.
There’s just over a week until the election. If there’s late movement to either Harris or Trump or either candidate outperforms their polls, that candidate could win decisively. While the election appears very close now, it may not be so close once we see results.
Silver wrote Saturday that worries about illegal immigration are a key issue for Trump supporters. In the three years that Joe Biden has been president, apprehensions at the US southwestern border surged to record highs, with 2.2 million apprehensions in the 2022 fiscal year
Adrian Beaumont, Election Analyst (Psephologist) at The Conversation; and Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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