Major election forecasters predict that Donald Trump will defeat Vice President Kamala Harris on November 5.
Nate Silver, Decision Desk HQ/The Hill, the Quantas Insights forecast, and the RealClearPolitics average of polls all show Trump a likely winner. The most lopsided forecast came from Quantas Insights, which predicts that Trump will shellack Harris in the Electoral College.
Those predictions are uncertain, of course. But they do show that Harris is in trouble, most notably in the battleground states.
Silver and Decision Desk HQ/The Hill
On October 17, Silver predicted that Trump would win the election.
“For the fourth time this cycle, the streams have crossed, and the nominal favorite in the race has changed,” Silver wrote:
Thanks in part to one of the first high-quality national polls in weeks to show him ahead — yes, it’s from Fox News, but Fox News polling has no history of GOP bias — Donald Trump now has a 50.2 percent chance of winning the Electoral College.
That’s not much different from Trump’s 49.4 percent chances yesterday: the difference is that he wins the Electoral College an additional 1 time out of 125. But Trump is past the 50-yard line — and above Harris’s chances, which are 49.5 percent — for the first time since Sept. 19. (Harris remains a clear but not overwhelming favorite in the popular vote, but that’s not how American elections are decided.)
But Silver also explained what small shifts eventually add up.
They “have worked in Trump’s favor,” Silver continued:
He bottomed out at a 41.7 percent win probability on Sept. 27, about two weeks after his debate with Kamala Harris. Since then, his odds have improved day-over-day 12 times, decreased 7 times, and been unchanged once. So that’s not an overwhelmingly consistent pattern, but it starts to add up. I want to avoid the sort of boiling frog syndrome where you ignore a trend because it happens slowly and incrementally.
Today, Silver wrote that Trump had “strong” polls. He led Harris is battleground Georgia and Nevada, and has “has steadily improved in our forecast over the past two weeks.”
But again, Silver wrote, the shifts to Trump are “incremental,” which means the “race remains highly competitive.”
The Decision Desk HQ/The Hill model shows Trump with a four-point advantage over Harris, 52-48, The Hill reported.
While that forecast said Harris had a 54 to 46 percent chance of winning, “those dynamics began to shift” in October.
“On Oct. 17, the model predicted the two candidates were equally likely to win next month, and Trump took the advantage Oct. 20,” the website continued:
The shift in election forecast coincides with the Republican candidate’s improved polling averages in Wisconsin and Michigan, two battleground states that previously leaned slightly toward Harris. Trump already had a slim advantage in Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina.
Of the seven swing states seen as decisive in determining the outcome of the 2024 election, Pennsylvania is alone in still favoring Harris in its polling average.
That comports with the RealClearPolitics average of polls. The national average has Harris with less than a 1-point lead: 0.9. That means the candidates are even; the race is a toss-up.
But Trump leads the RCP averages in the battleground states.
Quantas Insights, Mark Halperin
Election forecaster Quantas Insights predicts a sound Trump victory in the electoral college: 312-226, an 86-vote margin.
That would be a devastating indictment of the disastrous Biden-Harris administration, but in any event, political analyst Mark Halperin not only predicted that Harris could lose all seven battleground states, which would surely cost her the election, but also that a Trump victory would send the hate-Trump Left into crazed conniption.
A Trump victory would trigger “the greatest mental health crisis in the history of the country,” the former political director of ABC News told Tucker Carlson:
I think tens of millions of people will question their connection to the nation, their connection to other human beings, their connection to their vision of what the future for them and their children could be like. I think it will require an enormous amount of access to mental health professionals. I think it’ll lead to trauma in the workplace.
Halperin warned of fisticuffs in the workplace, and even at kids’ birthday parties. Alcoholism and divorces would result.
“I think it will be less anger and more a failure to understand how it could happen,” Halperin said:
You know, like the death of a child, or … your wife announcing she’s a lesbian and she’s leaving you for your best friend. Like something that’s so traumatic, that it’s impossible for even the most mentally healthy person to truly process and incorporate into their daily life.
I hope I’m wrong. But I think that’s what’s going to happen for tens of millions of people because they think that their fellow citizens’ supporting Trump is a sign of fundamental evil at the heart of their fellow citizens and of the nation. That’s how they view it.
Halperin is almost certainly correct.
After Trump won in 2016, Clinton voters went berserk, crying, shouting, and, in the case of the communist Antifa, vandalizing storefronts and setting fire across Washington, D.C., on inauguration day, 2017.
