UPDATE: Nate Silver Takes Down Model Slightly Favoring Kamala Harris As It ‘Isn’t Capturing The Story’

(AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh, File)

Election forecaster Nate Silver took down his election night model after it continued to show Kamala Harris with a slight lead in potentially being elected president, even as the New York Times needle tipped toward Donald Trump.

Silver wrote on his substack, “UPDATE: We are taking the model down for two reasons. One, it isn’t capturing the story of this election night well. It’s based only on called states and the timing of those calls. So far, all the calls have been predictable. But no swing states have been called, and there is a lot of information it doesn’t capture, information that is mostly good for Donald Trump and bad for Kamala Harris — not the 50/50 race the “called” states might imply. Something like the New York Times Needle is a much better product. And second, it’s very hard to do real-time debugging with a team of just two people in a real-time election night environment. So, we’re spending a lot of time trying to fix code that isn’t working right — and it’s distracting from our ability to cover the election for you. We think we took on one too many things, and we appreciate your patience.”

Silver 9:05 pm ET update had Harris with a 53 percent chance of winning the Electoral College, up 3 percent from 8:45. The model showed Harris winning with the so-called “blue wall” states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

Harris’s 53 percent likelihood of winning the Electoral College mirrored her 53 percent chance of winning Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, Silver’s model showed Trump sweeping Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina in the sun belt, but losing Nevada to Harris.

Silver’s model also gave Harris a 97 percent chance of winning Virginia, despite pundits focusing on the state being competitive at the last minute.

Silver explained his election night forecasting, writing, “With the model, we are trying to minimize any subjective decision-making tonight. However, we reserve the right to substitute the NYT Needle probability in any state for our own once a significant amount of the vote is in if we feel like our numbers are out to lunch. This will be rounded to the following categories: Likely (90 percent chance), Lean (70 percent) and Toss-Up (50 percent). If the Needle is down, we’ll use Polymarket prices for our rounded estimates instead.”

Editor’s note: This story was updated after Silver took down his model.