Trump Electoral College Advantage Buckles Despite His Popular Vote Lead Doubling; GOP Holds Steady in Senate, Expands House Lead: FDL Model (10/26/24)

If the 2024 elections were held today, the FDL Review model finds that Republicans would retake the Senate and presidency while holding the House of Representatives. This is unchanged from our findings last week.

Over the past week, former President Donald Trump’s advantage in the Electoral College shrank from 44 votes to six. This is because Vice President Kamala Harris captured a 0.007-point advantage in Pennsylvania, which Trump led last week by 0.11.

Hurting Trump at the margins, polling indicates that Harris’s supporters are marginally more enthusiastic and certain to vote than the former president’s. This could be the result of Trump’s lackluster ground-game operation.

That said, Trump’s 272 votes are a safer bet than Harris’s 266. Our model indicates that he leads in all ‘his’ states by at least 1.46 percentage points, whereas two of Harris’s states—Pennsylvania and Michigan—are within a percentage point.

Trump would win the national popular vote by 1.39 percentage points if the election were held today, up from 0.75 point last week. While the popular vote has no bearing on the presidential result, Trump would be the first Republican to win it since George W. Bush in 2004.

The GOP would prove similarly successful in the U.S. Senate elections if they were held today, flipping three seats—in Montana, Ohio, and West Virginia—for 52 total.

Republicans would come within three percentage points of flipping four more seats (in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin), indicating that a 56-seat GOP majority is within reach.

Wisconsin is the most likely of those four to flip, with Democrat incumbent Tammy Baldwin currently leading GOP nominee Eric Hovde by just 0.99 point.

If the 2024 elections were held today, the GOP would win the national House popular vote by 1.40 points, up from 0.54 point last week. That would yield a 21-seat GOP majority (228–207), compared to 17 last week.

As we wrote when discussing our model in 2020, it “emphasizes an FDL-developed metric that measures each state’s fundamentals and also considers past election results, public-opinion polling with adjustments for [past] accuracy (or lack thereof), and enthusiasm.” Our model correctly projected that President Joe Biden would win in 2020, almost nailing the final electoral margin.

Sanity Check

Though our model does not consider early-voting trends, these two sources of empirical data are tracking each other neatly.

Republicans are outvoting Democrats in Arizona and Georgia, where our model has Trump ahead. The two parties are tied in North Carolina, where Trump leads by 1.56 points in our model. Meanwhile, Democrats are outvoting Republicans in Michigan and Pennsylvania, where our model has Harris up narrowly.

Nevada and Wisconsin are exceptions to the foregoing. In the Silver State, Republicans are outvoting Democrats by six points, despite our model’s finding that Harris leads there by 1.10 points. Conversely, TargetSmart modeling indicates that Democrats are outstripping Republicans by 12 points in the Wisconsin early vote, despite our model’s finding that Trump leads the state by 4.74 points.

— Declan M. Hurley