As the 2024 election draws closer, an election forecast published on Friday is predicting the Electoral College vote totals for Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate and Donald Trump, the GOP presidential nominee.
A presidential candidate needs to secure 270 electoral votes for victory, and winning the national popular vote does not guarantee the White House.
The election forecast shows that the median likely range of total electoral votes for Harris is at 272 while Trump is at 266.
According to The Economist, the model estimates each major candidate’s chances of winning each state and the overall Electoral College.
The chance of a tie in the electoral college is less than 1 in 100,” The Economist said.
The Electoral College vote totals for Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumed Democratic presidential candidate, and Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, are predicted in an election forecast released on Friday as the 2024 election approaches.
In the Electoral College, which allots electoral votes to states based on population, Trump and Harris have roughly a one in two chance of winning, according to The Economist’s national forecast model released on Friday. Winning the national popular vote does not ensure a presidential candidate’s election to the White House; instead, they must secure 270 electoral votes.
Trump has 266 electoral votes, while Harris has a median likely range of 272 according to the election forecast.
This is a departure from the prediction for the 2020 election, in which Trump received 232 electoral votes and Democratic nominee Joe Biden received 306.
The model projects each prominent candidate’s odds of winning the Electoral College as a whole as well as each state, according to The Economist. Created by Columbia University, the forecast builds thousands of scenarios to predict the possibility of different outcomes of the race based on basic information about the economy, historical voting trends, and state-by-state demographics, as well as national and state-level polls.
“We run over 10,000 election simulations in order to calculate the likely electoral vote totals. The Economist stated that there is less than a one in a hundred chance of a tie in the electoral college.
Newsweek has emailed the campaigns of Harris and Trump to request comment.
As those battleground states, with a combined total of 77 electoral votes, will be crucial in determining the outcome of this year’s election, the forecast also identifies Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Michigan as important states to watch out for when it comes to electoral votes.
The forecast model most notably indicates that Pennsylvania, with 19 electoral votes, has the highest probability (24%), of being the state that wins the election.
Out of 1,000 likely Pennsylvanian voters polled on August 13 and 14, according to an Emerson College and RealClearPennsylvania survey released on Friday, 49% supported Trump and 48% supported Harris. With a 3 percent margin of error, the poll puts the candidates in a statistical deadlock.
This coincides with a sharp decline in the Democratic presidential ticket’s standing in the polls following Joe Biden’s historic decision to withdraw from the contest on July 21 and support his running mate. Although Biden was usually trailing, Harris has risen in the polls, now leading Trump in both national and swing state polling averages.
The change is further evidenced by a February Decision Desk HQ analysis based on nationwide polling, which projected that Trump would receive 312 Electoral votes in total, the most for a GOP candidate since George H.W. W. Bush’s triumph in 1988 after garnering 426 votes.
Decision Desk HQ predicted at the time that Trump would win several swing states, like Arizona and Nevada, which Biden turned blue in 2020.
Trump was also predicted to win Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, the states that make up the so-called “Blue Wall.”.
On the other hand, Harris leads Trump 49 to 47 percent in North Carolina and 50 to 45 percent in Arizona, according to a poll released by The New York Times and conducted by Siena College on Saturday. In Georgia, Trump leads with 50% of the vote, while in Harris, he has 46%. With 48% of the vote against the vice president’s 47% in Nevada, Trump also has a slim lead.
With 2,670 likely voters surveyed between August 8 and August 15, the poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points and results for four battleground states: Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina.
