No surprises in either of the primary elections in which I voted yesterday: Senator Klobuchar won 94% of the vote, and Representative Craig (MN-2) won 91%. Elsewhere in Minnesota, Representative Omar (MN-5) managed to stave off Don Samuels for the second straight primary election, expanding her margin from 50-48 in 2022 to 56-43 in 2024. Interestingly, AIPAC appears to have sat the Omar-Samuels primary out.
I thought this would be a good point in the campaign — long enough after the assassination attempt and the RNC and the Democrats’ change of candidate, but still before the DNC — to take stock of the state of the race on a state-by-state basis, using Nate Silver’s model as a guide.
Let’s start by counting the “very safe” electoral votes for both sides, which for this purpose I’ll define as a 95.5% or greater chance (i.e., two-sigma) of victory in Silver’s model:
Very Safe Democrat (170): California (99.6%), Connecticut (97.9%), District of Columbia (100.0%), Hawaii (95.6%), Maryland (99.7%), Illinois (98.7%), Maine-1 (97.7%), Massachusetts (99.3%), New Jersey (96.0%), New York (98.2%), Rhode Island (96.8%), Vermont (98.7%), Washington (98.4%)
Very Safe Republican (103): Alabama (99.1%), Arkansas (99.2%), Idaho (99.2%), Indiana (97.7%), Kansas (97.8%), Kentucky (99.4%), Louisiana (97.7%), Missouri (98.8%), Nebraska at large (99.0%), Nebraska-1 (97.4%), Nebraska-3 (99.7%), North Dakota (98.9%), Oklahoma (99.7%), South Dakota (98.3%), Tennessee (99.5%), Utah (96.2%), West Virginia (99.3%), Wyoming (99.6%)
All of those feel like sure things in practice, although I am a little surprised that Trump’s odds in Hawaii and New Jersey are as good as 25-to-1. I also have fantasies that Walz’s presence on the ticket can increase the Democratic chances in Nebraska’s 1st district, in which he was born.
Next, let’s look in descending order at the remaining states that each party expects to win, which for this purpose I’ll define as an 80% chance of victory in Silver’s model.
Expected Democrat (51): Delaware (94.0%), Oregon (92.7%), Minnesota (90.9%), Colorado (89.8%), New Mexico (85.3%), Virginia (81.7%), Maine at large (80.3%)
Expected Republican (82): Montana (94.9%), South Carolina (94.4%), Mississippi (92.9%), Ohio (89.6%), Iowa (86.3%), Texas (84.1%)
While some of the states in each column used to be swing states, given our current politics it would be surprising for any of these to defect to the other side, although both Virginia and Texas bear monitoring.
At this point, if everything were to have proceeded according to expectations then the Democrats would be ahead 221-185.
In descending order, here are the top Democratic targets to get from 221 to 270, per Silver’s model:
- New Hampshire (4) = 76.4%
- Nebraska-2 (1) = 67.1%
- Michigan (15) = 66.5%
- Wisconsin (10) = 63.8%
- Pennsylvania (19) = 59.1%
If Harris wins those and loses all the other swing states, she wins 270-268.
Conversely from the Trump perspective, in descending order here are the top Republican targets per Silver’s model to get beyond 185:
- Alaska (3) = 78.3%
- Florida (30) = 77.2%
- Maine-2 (1) = 74.0%
- North Carolina (16) = 60.7%
- Georgia (16) = 55.4%
- Arizona (11) = 51.6%
- Nevada (6) = 46.3%
Winning those states is how Trump gets to 268, which means he would need to add, say, Pennsylvania (40.9%) to get over the hump. Hence, the conventional wisdom that Pennsylvania is 2024’s tipping point state.
Three closing notes. First, as these probabilities suggest, right now you’d rather be in Harris’ shoes than Trump’s; today Silver’s model gives Harris a 56.7% chance of an electoral college victory, on an average nationwide popular vote advantage of 2.5%. Second, with increased swing-state polling in the past couple of weeks it no longer appears to be true that Trump’s “electoral college edge” in popular vote terms has widened from 2.0% to 2.5% with the replacement of Biden by Harris. Finally, it’s interesting to see Trump potentially needing to play defense in not only North Carolina, but perhaps also Florida, particularly in light of the abortion issue being on the ballot there.