And just like that, after suggesting that Vice President Kamala Harris’s honeymoon phase is over, polling guru Nate Silver went from a liberal darling to a charlatan who works in cahoots with Silicon Valley billionaire and past Republican megadonor Peter Thiel (regardless of the fact that Thiel has repeatedly said he is sitting out the 2024 election).
Silver, who publishes election data in the widely followed “Silver Bulletin,” reported a significant shift in the presidential race. His latest model showed former President Donald Trump’s odds of winning at 62.5% compared to 38.5% for Harris. He noted, “Harris is in fact on the decline in polls over the past couple of weeks in most of the key swing states.” Stacey Matthews posted on this story over the weekend.
It’s important to note that Silver is a Harris supporter, as he tells his followers in the post below.
More bad news for Democrats followed on Sunday morning. A New York Times/Sienna poll showed Trump leading Harris nationally by a margin of 48-47. Factored into Silver’s model, this poll pushed Trump’s odds of winning slightly higher still to 63.8%, compared to Harris’s 36%.
According to The Washington Examiner:
The former president is also favored to win every swing state.Silver’s current odds give Trump a 64% chance of winning Pennsylvania, 54% for Michigan, 53% for Wisconsin, 77% for Arizona, 75% for North Carolina, 68% for Georgia, and 61% for Nevada.The new probability total is a nearly five-point boost for Trump since Thursday, when he was given a 58.2% probability, itself a boost from the 52.4% a week prior. The prediction shows a further eroding of Harris’s honeymoon support since President Joe Biden dropped out in July.In a Substack post, Silver explained that the new poll was such bad news for Harris due to the large sample size and reliability of the poll, which he ranks as the second best. He said the new poll “confirms the model’s view that there’s been some sort of a shift in momentum in the race.”
Needless to say, Harris supporters, who had grown accustomed to her poll numbers moving in only one direction for six weeks, and tried to promote the narrative that her victory was inevitable, were outraged by the reversal in Silver’s model.
It took about a nanosecond for their mutiny to unfold. Their knives were out. Their campaign to discredit their former favorite pollster by tying him to Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, had begun.
Of course no one knows who will win the election. I gave up trying to predict election outcomes after the 2022 midterms when I was forced to delete the rough draft of a post I’d started in the hours before reality struck. My title had been, “How Sweet It Is.” Yes really.
That said, Harris’s gravity-defying momentum, much of it the result of Democrats’ tremendous relief that the spavined, senile President Joe Biden had left the race, has peaked.
For both candidates, much is riding on the outcome of Tuesday night’s presidential debate in Philadelphia.
During a weekend interview, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi absurdly asked journalist Kara Swisher if she thought Trump would even attend the debate. Swisher said she did and asked Pelosi if she knew something Swisher did not.
Pelosi’s response? “I know cowardice when I see it.”
Pelosi’s random remark aside, all eyes will be focused on the Philadelphia debate stage tomorrow night. And as Bette Davis famously uttered in the 1950 film “All About Eve,” “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.”
Elizabeth writes commentary for The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a member of the Editorial Board at The Sixteenth Council, a London think tank. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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