OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
An election expert who used to say that Vice President Kamala Harris would win by a huge margin now says that former President Donald Trump will win.
Thomas Miller, a data scientist who correctly predicted the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, had earlier backed Harris to win in 2024. In September, he told Newsweek that his model showed the Democrat would likely get more than 400 electoral votes.
Based on betting odds instead of polling data, the model now says that Trump is the favorite. Its most recent estimate is that the Republicans could win 345 Electoral College votes, Newsweek reported.
Newsweek has drawn up what a possible win for the former president with 345 Electoral College votes would look like. FiveThirtyEight says that in this case, he wins all the states where Harris has a lead of less than ten points, including the South and the Midwest.
The model first said that Trump would win by a small margin on October 7, when betting odds started to move in his favor.
Miller’s model puts betting odds ahead of survey data and uses what he calls “fundamentals,” or past election trends, to balance the data. This is something that most other models also do.
Miller is using data from the betting site PredictIt to fuel his model for the 2024 election. This is the same data that he used to make his correct guess in 2020.
The facts and the fundamentals, on the other hand, point to different outcomes.
As of October 20, Miller wrote on his website that “technical and fundamental analyses are not in alignment,” which means that past trends point to a Democratic victory while betting odds say Trump will win.
Polls still show that the race is close, but betting odds have continued to favor Trump. For example, Polymarket odds give Trump a 60.3% chance of winning nationally, while Harris only has a 39.7% chance.
In the past, betting odds have always been right about who would win the presidential race. However, they are not based on the same representational statistics as polls, so they are more likely to be wrong.
Miller told Newsweek that he fixes his model for any possible biases, which right now are tilted toward Trump.
“Prediction markets have a Republican bias,” Miller said. “We assessed the degree of Republican bias in 2020, and we currently correct for that degree of bias. What is uncertain, however, is the level of Republican bias in prediction markets in 2024. We are conducting studies across prediction markets that we hope will shed light on the degree of bias in 2024.”
Miller’s most recent estimate is a little better for Harris than the last one, but she’s still losing.
On October 26, the model said the vice president would only win 171 Electoral College votes, which was the worst showing for a candidate since 1996, when Sen. Bob Dole ran as a Republican.
“The 2024 race for the presidency has gone from toss-up to Republican landslide, to toss-up, to a possible Democratic landslide, to toss-up, and now to a possible Republican landslide,” Miller said.
“Could prediction markets and associated election forecasts turn again with less than two weeks before the close of voting on November 5? Yes. We expect to see increased trading and high volatility in the final week of the race,” Miller added.
Since 1980, there have been 11 presidential elections.
The only one where the winning candidate had worse chances than the losing candidate was 2016, when both betting markets and regular polls didn’t see Trump winning.
CNN senior data reporter Harry Enten pointed to several factors during a network segment on Wednesday indicating that Trump is very likely to defeat Harris.
Trump and Harris are currently in a tight race, with the former president holding a narrow lead over the vice president in six of the top seven battleground states, according to RealClearPolitics averages.
But on “CNN News Central,” Enten pointed out that voter dissatisfaction with the country’s direction, President Joe Biden’s unpopularity, and high Republican registration numbers are all indicators that favor a Trump victory.
“Just 28% of Americans, voters, think the country is going in the right direction, is on the right track. And I want to put that into a historical perspective for you. Okay, what’s the average percentage of the public that thinks that the country is on the right track when the incumbent party loses? It’s 25%,” Enten said.
“That 25% looks an awful bit like that 28% up there. It doesn’t look anything, anything like this 42% [average when the incumbent party won] doesn’t look anything like this 28%. So, the bottom line is very few Americans think the country is on the right track at this particular point. It tracks much more with when the incumbent party loses than with [when] it wins,” he continued.
Enten further pointed out that Biden’s low approval rating may historically suggest a loss for Harris because previous presidents with net negative approval ratings have not been succeeded by candidates from their own party.
“In fact, I went back through history, there isn’t a single time in which 28% of the American public thinks the country is going on the right track in which the incumbent party actually won,” Enten noted further. “They always lose when just 28% of the country believes that the country is on the right track.”
“Now, we don’t know if Kamala Harris is going to succeed Joe Biden, but we know back in 2008, George W. Bush’s approval rating was down in the 20’s. Did a Republican succeed George W. Bush? No. How ’bout in 1968? Lyndon Baines Johnson, his net approval rating was negative. Did a Democrat succeed Lyndon Baines Johnson? No,” the data reporter said. “How ’bout in ’52 Harry S. Truman, his approval rating was in the 20’s, if not the upper teens.”