How Will The Popular Vote Go?
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Polls compiled by FiveThirtyEight and analysis done by me. This analysis is of the almost 9,000 polls conducted in the United States. The analysis is a beta distribution where the two parameters are how many wins Harris or Trump got in polls. The wins are weighted by how long ago they were (half life of 2 weeks), what the sample was (adults, registered voters, likely voters), and sample size. this analysis includes every Trump v. Harris poll going back to 2021. Each of the bars represents the relative likelihood that that percentage is the chance Harris will win the election. This method assumes that things are up to chance and tries to estimate the most likely chance not the chance itself. The intuition of this graph is this: the idea that Harris has a 17% chance of winning is represented by the bar above 30%. It's size relative to the bar at 50% tells you how much more or less likely that idea of being true is. Something important is that in the case of the poll being a tie, it is counted as a win for Harris. This is true for the state-level polls as well. |
How About the Electoral College?
The Chance Trump Wins the Electoral College is
4%
Here's the Relative Likelihood of each vote total in the Electoral College
There are only a few states that matter. These 8 are the ones that had the closest vote totals in 2020. This method assumes that all the other states will go the way they did in 2020.
Harris and Trump are "given" a certain amount of electoral votes. This is the number of electoral votes from states that voted for them last time, minus the 8 states listed here. For Harris this is 231, and for Trump it's 189.
To calculate the probability of which way the electoral college will go, we look at every possible combination of thes 8 states voting for either candidate. There are 2^8 of them, because for each state there are 2 ways it can go (Harris or Trump). We then can calculate the likelihood of the state voting that way given the data we have (the same analysis as is done for the popular vote). Once that it done, we can add up the likelihoods of each of the combinations that Trump wins and report the chance that Trump wins the electoral vote.
Arizona |
Florida |
Georgia |
Michigan |
Nevada |
North Carolina |
Pennsylvania |
Wisconsin |