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By Alia Shoaib
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Polling analyst Nate Silver said he thinks Kamala Harris should be nervous about Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, two crucial swing states that are key for Democrats to win the upcoming presidential election.
In an appearance on the Impolitic podcast, Silver noted that if Harris wins Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, along with the other states Democrats expect to win, she would reach the needed 270 threshold of electoral votes without needing to win other swing states.
In this scenario, Harris would also need to win one Electoral College vote from the swing district in Omaha, Nebraska, as three of the state's five electoral votes are awarded by congressional district.
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This is the most straightforward path to victory for Harris, but it is not guaranteed, according to Silver.
"Our model tends to look at things more probabilistically," he said. "Wisconsin, for example, is a state where the polls have considerably overestimated Democrats the past couple of elections. Pennsylvania is a state where, look, Joe Biden was a home son, he was born in Scranton. And Harris doesn't have that."
"Those states would make me nervous," Silver said, adding that Michigan is comparatively "safer."
Newsweek reached out to Harris and Trump's campaigns via email for comment outside of regular working hours.
Silver, a leading polling analyst and founder of polling aggregator FiveThirtyEight, which he is no longer affiliated with, has come out with his own model to predict the outcome of the election.
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The forecast, which builds upon the methodology of the former FiveThirtyEight election model, integrates polling data, economic indicators, and historical trends to estimate each candidate's likelihood of victory.
He said that according to his forecast, there is currently a 54 percent chance that Harris will win, compared to Donald Trump's 46 percent, which he said is "about as close as elections get."
Silver noted that in all seven of the most important swing states, polling averages are within 2 points.
He said that "the heartbreaking scenario for Democrats" would be if they lost one of the three key swing states by a small margin, as there's not an easy "backup" pathway to victory for Harris.
"I'll put it like this: there's no reason to feel safe about this Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania path, given how narrow it is and given polling errors in those states in recent past elections," Silver said.
He noted that one other possible option for Democrats if they lost one of these key states could be winning North Carolina, a state where Republicans are currently dealing with a scandal involving controversial comments made by their gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson.
Trump narrowly won North Carolina in both the 2016 and 2020 elections.
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