Trump or Harris, who will win? The New Statesman's US election forecast

Donald Trump is aiming for a second term, Joe Biden is down, Kamala Harris has rejuvenated the base. Can the Democrats win? Or is Trump stronger than he seems? Welcome to the New Statesman's election forecast for the 2024 US election.

Our model will provide near-daily forecasts of vote share estimates for each U.S. state using a variety of polls and demographic data.

For much of 2024, Joe Biden lagged behind Trump in the polls. Trump, unusually, was ahead of the incumbent – and the televised debate between the two in June only reinforced that dynamic. This put Trump within reach of important states such as Virginia, New Hampshire and Minnesota.

But Biden's decision to withdraw changed a lot. The Democratic base has rallied behind Harris, although it is unclear how sustainable the current surge of energy is.

The election will likely be decided in seven states: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia and wild-card contest North Carolina. Biden won six of those elections in 2020, but Trump has maintained long-term leads in all of them this year.

The New Statesman's model is a probabilistic model. Polls have margins of error, and in some of these key states pollsters have performed poorly in the past. But analysts have also learned from their mistakes: namely, from the catastrophic misjudgments during Hillary Clinton's 2016 election campaign.

A healthy model should take all of this into account. While pollsters claim they have improved their methodology, healthy skepticism would not be amiss. For example, after 2016, the industry claimed it would change its sampling and surveys. But in 2020, the Trump vote was again underestimated in important swing states.

In 2020, our model predicted that Trump had a one in 10 chance of remaining in the White House. If our model had run in 2016, the numbers would have shown that Trump would have had a one in three chance. Pollsters claim they have corrected because they have underestimated the Trump base since this election. But there is a risk that they have also overcorrected.

Here are the state-by-state odds for Kamala Harris to win.

[See also: Vladimir Putin’s enemy within]