Top election forecaster Nate Silver has said the 2024 election is a "pure toss-up" following a weekend of polling data that saw good news for both Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.
The veteran pollster said the numbers were good "but not great" for either candidate, as his forecast model showed Harris winning exactly 270 electoral votes a day out from the election.
Silver has maintained that "50-50 is the only responsible forecast," as polling data remains inconclusive on which candidate will win the election.
Over the weekend, the Harris campaign received a major boost when Ann Selzer, a highly regarded Iowa pollster, showed the vice president beating Trump by 3 points in the Hawkeye State, which was previously thought to be an easy win for the Republican nominee.
The poll, which comes from one of the most historically accurate statisticians in the country, has ominous ramifications for Trump in the rest of the Midwest—a forecast made worse by the final New York Times/ Sienna poll, which showed Harris ahead by small margins in Nevada, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia and Pennsylvania. Winning those battleground states and reliably blue states would give the Democratic nominee 293 electoral votes.
Trump also saw promising numbers over the weekend. The final Morning Consult poll had him ahead in North Carolina and Georgia, while drawing with Harris across the Midwest and in Arizona.
With Election Day hours away, the two candidates are almost out of chances to tip the scales. Most election models agree with Silver's sentiment. The Economist's model has Harris winning 270 electoral votes and Trump winning 268, while 538 gives Trump a 53 percent chance of winning the election.
The betting odds model used by data scientist Tom Miller also has Trump winning exactly 270 electoral votes, though this is down from the landslide of more than 300 votes it predicted less than a week ago.
Several models freeze their results the night before Election Day, and most major pollsters have concluded their surveys, meaning there is unlikely to be any more fluctuation in these predictions.
However, betting odds continue to change, and bookies have seen Donald Trump's odds rapidly decline in the past week.
On October 29, the prediction site Kalshi gave Trump a 64 percent chance of victory, while Harris received 36 percent. However, over the weekend, Trump's chances declined to 56 percent, against 44 percent for Harris, which is more in line with the chances given by traditional polling.
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