Pollster Nate Silver projected that former President Donald Trump has a 65.7% chance of winning the presidency in November. He gives President Joe Biden a 33.7% chance with a narrow 0.5% chance of either candidate failing to reach 270 electoral votes.
Silver also gives Biden a 51% chance to win the popular vote with third-party candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. slated to take 4.3% of the popular vote. The mode’s returns are based on 40,000 simulations of the election.
The projection differs from FiveThirtyEight’s, an organization he created, which believes Biden is a 51% favorite over Trump.
“The candidate who I honest-to-God think has a better chance (Trump) isn’t the candidate I’d rather have win (Biden),” he said. That conclusion is backed up by his model, which found “that Trump was favored by a slightly larger degree” than Silver had anticipated.
“If the Electoral College/popular vote gap looks anything like it did in 2016 or 2020, you’d expect Biden to be in deep trouble if the popular vote is roughly tied,” he added. “So if we’re being honest, pundits who obsess over whether Biden is 1 point ahead in national polls are kind of missing the point.”
Silver says the model is similar to the one he made for the 2020 election, which correctly predicted Biden would win, except that he’s factoring in third-party candidates and without “Covid-specific assumptions.”
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Trump and Biden are tied in FiveThirtyEight’s national polling average as of June 26, but the former president is leading in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.
CNN’s presidential debate between the two will be held Thursday in Atlanta.