Election forecaster Nate Silver updated his model on Tuesday to reflect the surge in support for Vice President Kamala Harris, who now ties or leads Donald Trump in most recent battleground state polling. According to Silver’s Silver Bulletin polling average, which accounts for poll reliability, sample size and recency, Harris leads Trump in the presidential race by 3.1 points, 46.8% to 43.7%.
“We’ve seen momentum for Harris with her rising consistently to about a 2.5% lead in national polls,” Silver said on MSNBC, identifying the main cause of the shift as the age issue that had mainly afflicted President Joe Biden. With Biden out of the race, it’s Trump who is the oldest major-party candidate in history.
“I think it’s 80 or 90 percent the age issue. Voters said consistently that it’s the number one problem. I mean, Biden’s approval ratings have gone up a little bit since he dropped out because people just thought it was not responsible to run for president until he was 86,” Silvers said. “[Harris] has other issues, inflation and the border, but they’ve more than doubled their chances of winning the election overnight, and that’s a pretty remarkable thing to do in the span of this crazy month we’ve had.”
Silver’s average matches the conclusions of other polling aggregators, with the Cook Political Report releasing new polling that shows Harris erasing Trump’s lead in most swing states.
Before Biden dropped out, Democrats were despairing at poll numbers that showed Biden consistently trailing in all the battleground states he won against Trump in 2020, including the “Blue Wall” of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Now there’s fresh hope that Harris has turned the tide.