Election Guru Drops Brutal Election Bomb on Kamala Harris as 'Mediocre' Trend Hits Her Hard

Momentum and excitement can only carry a campaign so far. If polling expert Nate Silver’s recent prediction holds true, one of those places might not be the White House.

Nate Silver, the founder of FiveThirtyEight, who now shares his model on Substack, has predicted a decline of more than five points in Kamala Harris’ chances of winning the presidency in the past week.

Although Silver’s model still classifies the race as a toss-up — with any scenario between a 60-40 percentage split falling into that category — Trump’s odds stood at 58.2 percent on Wednesday, compared to Harris’ 41.6 percent, which is just within the edge of that toss-up range.

This represents a drop from the previous week's forecast of 52.4 percent for Trump and 47.3 percent for Harris.

According to Silver, Harris’ weaker performance in key battleground states is the main factor. Despite her reasonable strength in national polls, the enthusiasm and momentum from the Democratic National Convention hadn’t delivered the boost her campaign had hoped for.

“There’s room to debate the convention bounce stuff, but Harris has been getting a lot of mediocre state polls lately,” Silver wrote, as reported by Fox News.

On social media, Silver pointed to problems in two of the critical states Harris must win to defeat Donald Trump — Pennsylvania and Michigan.

“National polls and polls of other swing states mostly decent for Harris, but erosion in PA/MI hurts a lot in the model,” Silver wrote on Wednesday.

“In MI, the polling average has fallen from Harris +3.1 pre-DNC to Harris +1.9 now.”

By late Thursday, many on social media had noted that the model now leaned toward a Trump victory:

Silver explained that while Harris had a fairly good day overall, she was hurt by several polls from a Democratic group that showed her tied with Trump in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

“Our polling averages apply a relatively harsh ‘house effects’ adjustment to partisan-sponsored polls, so it interprets ties in partisan polls as losing. And PA/MI/WI polls are really important to the forecast."

Silver added, “But we’re now finally starting to get some post-Labor Day polls, which look decent for Harris, and those will be subject to less of a convention bounce adjustment than polls that went into the field immediately after the DNC. So we’ll see what the several days bring.”

Silver also mentioned that while national polls seem promising for Harris, “the probability of an Electoral College/popular vote split is up to almost 20%.”

Due to the large voter bases in blue states like California and New York, which also hold significant races and ballot issues, a split between the popular vote and the Electoral College, especially with Trump as the nominee, remains a strong possibility in any GOP win.

Harris’ weaker standing in national polling averages compared to both Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020 has raised concerns for anyone who believed that the “vibes” and “joy” in her camp were continuing without interruption.

While she might have a stronger chance of winning than Joe Biden did, as Silver pointed out, “so would most banana slugs, were they eligible for ballot access.”

Her rise seems to have plateaued, and a recent softball interview with CNN didn’t go as well as hoped. That leaves the upcoming debates and the final stretch of the campaign, where Harris can no longer rely solely on scripted rallies.

At this stage, if you wanted to bet on a candidate, both subjectively and objectively, you’d likely pick Trump.