Former President Donald Trump dropped below a 40 percent chance of an election victory for the first time on Tuesday, in a forecast by a major polling aggregator.
FiveThirtyEight’s election forecast gave the Republican candidate a 39 percent chance of winning the Electoral College, after a slate of strong polling for Vice President Kamala Harris boosted her odds to greater than 60 percent.
Previously, Trump had been performing close to the margin of error between the two candidates. When the model first relaunched following the replacement of President Joe Biden, it gave Trump a 41 percent chance of winning, which was rising steadily before the ABC debate on September 10.
Since then, Harris has received strong polls both nationally and in key swing states that have boosted her chances. However, FiveThirtyEight’s model weighs surveys by geographical region, so while they show Harris doing well in Iowa, which is in the Midwest, she is unlikely to carry the state itself.
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The model also uses a combination of polling and “fundamentals,” which are long-term factors known to influence voting behavior, such as the economy. These are similar to the “13 keys to the White House” popularized by historian Allan Lichtman, known as the Nostradamus of U.S. elections due to his track record predicting the results, who is currently predicting a Harris victory in November.
However, an internal Trump campaign memo revealed that his team was happy with polling numbers in the week after the ABC debate, with a survey of 1,893 likely voters across seven key states showing the former president ahead by 3 percentage points.
Newsweek hasreached out to the Trump campaign for comment on the results via email.
On Monday, the Harris campaign received good news from Pennsylvania, widely considered to be the most significant swing state in this election, with a poll that put the Democrat ahead by 48.6 percent to 45.6 percent, her best result there this month.
Nate Silver, who originally founded FiveThirtyEight before it was bought by ABC News, had a more optimistic view for Trump. His model, run via his blog Silver Bulletin, had almost the exact reverse odds for the election, putting Trump at 60 percent and Harris at 38 percent.
“The first post-debate polls are in, and they helped Kamala Harris very slightly in our forecast—but we’d caution against reading too much into any of this data just yet,” Silver wrote last Thursday. Silver has consistently been more moderated about Harris’ chances this election than other forecasters.
While Silver was at FiveThirtyEight, the polling aggregator accurately predicted several election outcomes, including 2012 and 2020. In the former president’s successful 2016 campaign, its forecast gave Trump higher odds than many other models, estimating that he had around a 30 percent chance of beating Hillary Clinton.