Harris tops Trump for first time in Nate Silver’s election forecast

Pollster Nate Silver’s election forecast now shows Vice President Harris narrowly leading former President Trump for the first time since the model launched.

Harris tops Trump by 1.4 percentage points in the Silver Bulletin’s national polling average, marking the vice president’s first lead in the forecast. The latest model shows Harris with 45.5 percent support compared to Trump’s 44.1 percent.

The race between Harris and Trump is still labeled as a “toss-up” in the most recent update to the forecast, posted Sunday, with the model predicting Harris has a 51 percent chance of winning the Electoral College.

Silver said on social media the race for the Electoral College likely will be a close one.

“One heuristic way to look at this is that if Harris winds up somewhere in between Clinton 2016 and Biden 2020, it makes for an extremely close outcome in the Electoral College. And that’s the model’s best guess as to the outcome,” Silver wrote on the social platform X about the latest election forecast.

Harris has generated enthusiasm within the Democratic Party in the opening weeks of her campaign, raising $310 million last month. Trump’s campaign announced last week it raised nearly $139 million in July and has $327 million in cash on hand.

Silver switched his rating of the presidential contest to a “toss-up” on Thursday, saying Harris has made it a closer race than when President Biden was on the top of the ticket.

Harris has closed the gap between her and Trump in many national and swing-state polls in recent weeks. A new CBS News/YouGov poll found the two candidates tied in key battleground states and Harris leading Trump nationally by 1 point.

Trump’s campaign dismissed the CBS News/YouGov poll on Sunday, accusing it of putting “a finger on the scale of polling to inflate results” for Harris. Silver responded to the criticism of the poll on X, writing, “Bullish for Harris.”