The 2024 presidential election will come down to these three states

FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver introduced his new presidential election forecast with an almost 5,000-word essay on the state of the race between President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump . You can read it here , but the short version is this:

Thanks to commanding Trump leads in Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada, all states Biden won in 2020, Biden needs to win all three of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Silver's new model has Biden winning two out of three of those states 54% of the time, but only winning all three of them 32% of the time.

And that seems to be the driving factor in Silver’s model. Considering every other state, Silver’s final estimation is that Trump has a 66% chance of winning the election compared to Biden’s 34%. To put that in perspective, in 2012, when Silver first attained election forecasting fame, he estimated that then-President Barack Obama had a 60% chance of beating Mitt Romney.

Silver went on to explain that while Biden does have some fundamentals going for him, the biggest ones, such as the economy, are not nearly as strong as Democrats wish they were.

“One problem is that the economy isn’t all that good,” Silver wrote. “Real GDP grew by 2.5 percent last year , following 1.9 percent in 2022. It grew at an annualized rate of 1.3 percent in the first quarter of 2024, though it’s expected to return to trend for the rest of the year. Two-ish percent economic growth is fine — and may reflect the new normal — but it’s below the long-term median growth rate in the US .”

“Yes, the labor market is tight and that’s great for many types of workers,” Silver continued. “But it’s just kind of BS to imply that voter concerns about the economy reflect misinformation — when throughout Biden’s term, the average American has struggled to see enough gains in her paycheck to keep up with inflation.”

“Biden is buoyed in the economic index by the stock market,” Silver concluded. “But overall, the economy is just average.”

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If anything, I think Silver undersells the economic pain consumers are feeling, especially on housing , food , cars , and credit card debt .

But his overall analysis, that the election is going to come down to Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, is dead on.