Silver Bulletin

Why Harris is leading in our polling averages — but not in our forecast. And why it’s hard to know where we’re headed next.

The race has never been in a “steady state” since the Biden debate
What’s made this race uniquely challenging to forecast is that there hasn’t really been a slow news cycle since the debate on June 28. In rapid succession, we had: the debate, an incredible pressure campaign by Democrats to get Biden to drop out, the assassination attempt against Trump, Trump naming JD Vance as his running mate, the Republican convention, Biden dropping out, Harris securing the nomination overnight, Harris naming Tim Walz as her running mate, the Democratic convention, and then Kennedy dropping out.

In principle, you could say something like: let’s look at the polls from back when things were “normal”, ignore what they say immediately after one of these “crazy” events, and then wait for them to settle down again. (In fact, as I’ll explain below, the model sort of attempts to do this.) But it’s hard to know what counts as “normal” in this election: