Kamala Harris is now the favourite to beat Donald Trump for the first time, according to US polling guru

America’s foremost polling guru has revealed a shift in the presidential race, with Kamala Harris reaching a critical threshold for the first time.

“The streams have crossed.”

So said American polling guru Nate Silver today, revealing Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris had, for the first time, overtaken Republican Donald Trump as the most likely winner of November’s election. According to his much-vaunted model, at least.

Ms Harris, the current Vice President, has been gaining on Mr Trump since President Joe Biden decided to withdraw from the race, leading the Democrats to quickly coalesce behind her as his replacement.

But she was still the underdog until today, when Mr Silver’s model gave her a 50.5 per cent of winning the electoral college, compared to Mr Trump’s 48.8 per cent. Whatever happens, it is still very, very tight.

The streams have crossed.https://t.co/vsGVG18HHIpic.twitter.com/JF8Mf7QKMZ

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) August 4, 2024

In an American presidential election, every state is assigned a certain number of electoral votes, which reflect its number of congressional districts plus its two senators. To become president, you need to reach a threshold of 270 electoral votes.

Win the popular vote in any given state and, with a couple of annoyingly convoluted exceptions, you get all of its electoral votes.

That doesn’t require a majority of the popular vote at a national level; indeed multiple presidents, including Mr Trump in 2016, were elected even though they received fewer total votes than their rival.

Hence the unrelenting focus on a small handful of swing states. Most of America’s 50 states lean heavily towards the Democrats or Republicans, meaning their electoral votes are almost a foregone conclusion. Around ten states – realistically, even fewer – will decide the outcome.

You can see the battleground states in tan, the safe Democratic states in blue, and the safe Republican states in red. Picture: 270toWin

All of which makes the task of building a predictive model more complicated than it would otherwise need to be. When someone like Mr Silver tries to predict the election’s outcome, he doesn’t just need to factor in the national popular vote, but also the most probable result in every swing state.

Then you need to consider how reliable each polling company’s numbers are; the size of the sample in each survey; whether it canvasses likely voters or merely registered voters (voting is not compulsory in the US); and whether it includes or excludes third-party candidates like independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Keep all of that complexity in mind when you read what comes next.

So, according to Mr Silver’s national polling average, which considers all those factors listed above, Ms Harris is currently at 45.5 per cent of the popular vote, above Mr Trump’s 44.1 per cent and Mr Kennedy’s 5 per cent.

When Mr Biden dropped out, she was at 41.1 per cent, comfortably behind Mr Trump’s 45.6 per cent. So the current trajectory here clearly favours the Democrats.

Donald Trump. Picture: Kamil Krzanczynski/AFP

Looking at the swing states, more specifically, Mr Silver’s polling average puts Ms Harris ahead in: Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.

Mr Trump is ahead in: Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina.

Plug those results into the electoral map and you get, I really kid you not, Ms Harris at 270 electoral votes, the bare minimum required for victory, and Mr Trump at 268. Which means a single state swapping sides could change the result of the entire election.

“When we launched the presidential model on June 26, in the lifetime ago when Joe Biden was the Democratic nominee, the headline in the post that introduced the model was that the election wasn’t a toss-up,” Mr Silver wrote.

“Instead, Biden had persistently been behind in the states that were most likely to decide the electoral college, enough so that he was about a 2:1 underdog in the election.

“His situation wasn’t unrecoverable, or at least it wasn’t until the debate. But you’d rather have had Donald Trump’s hand to play every day of the week and twice on Sundays.

“Now, however, it’s far from clear whose position you’d rather be in, and I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to bet either on Harris or on Trump.

“It’s a toss-up in the states that are most likely to decide the election.

“Although we can’t tell you who’s going to win, there’s one thing I think we can say with some confidence: Democrats are lucky that they’re getting a second chance in this election with Harris instead of Biden.”

It’s all very exciting then, for the politicos among us, or stressful, for the partisans, or perhaps just mildly interesting for those who don’t particularly care one way or the other.

Kamala Harris. Picture: Elijah Nouvelage/AFP

Pennslyvania, and its hefty 19 electoral votes, are critical. It’s hard for either side, but particularly the Democrats, to win the election without it.

Which makes Ms Harris’s search for a vice presidential nominee all the more important. As it happens, Pennsylvania’s current and quite unusually popular governor, Josh Shapiro, is among the top contenders.

The Vice President is expected to name her running mate on Tuesday, US time, and that announcement will be followed by a whirlwind tour of key swing states.

“At this moment, we face a choice between two visions for our nation: one focused on the future and the other on the past,” her campaign posted on social media today.

“This campaign is about people coming together, fuelled by love of country, to fight for the best of who we are.”

The reported shortlist of potential vice presidential candidates also includes Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, Arizona Senator Mark Kelly and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.