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By Theo Burman
Live News Reporter
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Top polling aggregator FiveThirtyEight has rereleased its election forecast model for 2024 on Friday, giving Vice President Kamala Harris a 58 percent chance of victory in November.
The updated model gives former President Donald Trump a 41 percent chance of victory, along with a less than 1-in-100 chance of no Electoral College winner. This is an increase from President Joe Biden's chances in the old model, in which he was neck-and-neck with Trump.
FiveThirtyEight, which is owned by ABC News and is widely considered to be one of the leading election analysis sites, suspended its previous forecast between Biden and Trump on July 21, when the president announced that he would not be seeking re-election.
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However, despite saying that the model would be back once a "presumptive Democratic nominee" was announced, the forecast was published three weeks after Harris achieved that distinction on August 2. It comes a day after Harris accepted the nomination at the Democratic National Convention.
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The model is based on an aggregation of polls within each state, weighted according to past reliability, which is then fed through one thousand different simulations to predict how each state might vote.
In a statement on the model's release, FiveThirtyEight said: "Our forecast starts out with a slight lead for Harris, reflecting her current edge in polls but uncertainty about how the rest of the election could impact the state of the race.
"With 75 days to go, we think anything from a clear Trump victory to a clear Harris win is possible."
Before being suspended, the model had Biden and Trump at roughly equal chances to win the election- something that went against predictions made by other forecasters, such as FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver and The Economist. Both those models gave Biden around a 30 percent chance of winning.
Many other forecast models were back up and running sooner after being suspended temporarily in the wake of the Biden-Harris swap, with The Economist currently giving Harris a 3 in 5 chance of winning against Trump.
The lack of a new FiveThirtyEight forecast for more than four weeks after Biden dropped out of the race was met with frustration from some readers. Several of the top comments on FiveThirtyEight's podcast, published on YouTube, made note of the delay with one reading: "It's been a month, and FiveThirtyEight still hasn't turned their model back on."
Another said: "No model? The least you could do is have Eliot [FiveThirtyEight's editorial director of data analytics] on the pod to discuss why it's taking so long and describe the journey
ABC News and FiveThirtyEight did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the questions swirling online about when its model would be back up and running.
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Silver left the site in 2023 and now runs a similar newsletter, the Silver Bulletin, with its own model. Silver and FiveThirtyEight came to national attention after accurately predicting—almost precisely—former President Barack Obama's two election victories.
During the 2016 election, FiveThirtyEight gave Trump a 30 percent chance of winning the election, which was higher than other forecasts, many of which put former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's chances between 80 and 90 percent. In 2020, model accurately predicted that Biden would win.
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