Nate Silver Calls The Presidential Race a Toss-Up Two Days After Predicting a Trump Victory

(AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

The presidential race is now a toss-up according to elections analyst and FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver .

“The presidential election is a toss-up,” read the matter-of-fact headline on Silver’s Substack on Thursday.

“When we launched the presidential model on June 26 — in the lifetime ago when Joe Biden was the Democratic nominee — the headline in the post that introduced the model was that the election wasn’t a toss-up. Instead, Biden had persistently been behind in the states that were most likely to decide the Electoral College, enough so that he was about a 2:1 underdog in the election despite the uncertainties in the race,” began Silver.

“Now that the election is in kamala_mode, however, it’s far from clear whose position you’d rather be in, and I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to bet either on [Kamala] Harris or on [Donald] Trump ,” he continued. “At FiveThirtyEight, we actually had a formal definition of a ‘toss-up’, which is an election where each candidate had at least a 40 percent chance of winning. We’re now quite comfortably into that territory.”

Silver went on to note that his model gave Harris a 54% chance of winning in Michigan, 50% chance of winning Wisconsin, and 47% chance of winning Pennsylvania.

While he submitted that “Democrats shouldn’t get too out over their skis about this,” Silver concluded that “there’s one thing I think we can say with some confidence: Democrats are lucky that they’re getting a second chance in this election with Harris instead of Biden.”

Just two days ago, Silver’s model gave Trump a 61.3% chance of winning the Electoral College, leaving Harris with just a 38.1% chance of prevailing. “Harris is a popular vote favorite and an Electoral College underdog—but much less of an underdog than Biden,” observed Silver at the time.

The change in his model reflects Harris’s growing momentum in the polls and public perception as Trump struggles to regain his footing after a widely-panned appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists conference on Wednesday.