Although Vice President Kamala Harris has built up a small lead over her rival and Republican candidate Donald Trump, the situation is still fluid. Against the backdrop, veteran pollster Nate Silver delved into the prospects of both candidates in two of the key swing states.
Tar Heel State – Critical For Harris: “The hottest club in the electoral college is North Carolina,” Silver said in his Silver Bulletin substack post published on Wednesday. Explaining the rationale, he noted that it is the first state to begin any form of early voting, with county officials expected to mail out absentee ballots next week.
In the Silver Bulletin model, North Carolina is the third-most likely tipping state, only behind Pennsylvania and Michigan, Silver, who founded polling analytics website FiveThirtyEight but is now no longer associated with it, said.
“If Kamala Harris wins it, she'll have a 97 percent chance of winning the Electoral College.” the polling analyst said. Harris' polling average is slightly better in North Carolina than in its neighbor Georgia. The vice president has a 38.5% chance of winning North Carolina and a 37.4% chance at Georgia, he said, adding that there is the possibility of her winning the former and not the latter.
Silver said there is an 86% chance that the two states will vote together, i.e. either Harris or Trump wins both the states.
Tale Of 2 States: North Carolina and Georgia aren’t essentially similar, Silver said. The two states are racially diverse, and the non-U.S. citizen population, considered a proxy for immigration, is above median in both states, he said. The analyst noted that North Carolina is quite a bit whiter, potentially leading some analysts to think North Carolina could revert to bluer this year. He noted that Harris has managed to woo back typical Democratic voters, namely Hispanic and Asian Americans, among whom Biden was badly underperforming.
Georgia is younger and wealthier, he said.
“People probably overestimate the degree to which states ‘trend’ in one direction instead of there sometimes being mean-reversion,” Silver said. He noted that North Carolina trended strongly toward Democrats in 2008, but the party has consistently lost presidential and Senate elections there ever since.
Both Georgia and North Carolina, the polling analyst said, are more conservative than what is deduced based on voter self-identify on a liberal-conservative scale in the Cooperative Election Study. To make his case, he noted that both states haven’t legalized weed even for medicinal purposes. “Both states are relatively religious, and both have a high share of Black voters, who often identify as socially conservative even if they vote for Democrats,” he said.
Silver does not expect both states to swing much, with a one-point shift in national polls likely translating to about a 0.9-point shift in North Carolina and Georgia.
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