Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign suffered a series of misfires and self-inflicted errors which may cost the Republican the election, according to forecasters.
The team at Split Ticket said Trump has seemingly been “intent on squandering” the advantages he had in the race when President Joe Biden was still the presumptive 2024 Democratic candidate, and that may result in a victory for Kamala Harris.
They highlighted a series of “undisciplined” comments made by Trump and his allies during the campaign, and accused the GOP of focusing too much on attacking transgender health care when voters do not consider this a pivotal election issue.
Newsweek has contacted the campaign teams for Trump and Harris for comment via email.
The comments from Split Ticket also featured their final forecast of the 2024 election, which gave Harris a 53 percent chance of victory.
The team cited a number of reasons why Trump was seen as the clear favorite while Biden was seeking reelection and then pointed as the potentially costly mistakes the former president has made since Harris has taken over the Democratic ticket.
These errors included Trump suggesting Harris, who is of both Indian and Jamaican heritage, “happened to turn Black” in recent years for political gain in late July. The former president also received backlash after comedian Tony Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” in a joke during a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden on October 27.
“Between the aftermath of inflation, an unpopular President Joe Biden still in office, and the GOP issue edge on the economy and immigration, Trump has a number of winds blowing at his back,” the Split Ticket team wrote. “We would not be surprised to see a Trump win on election day in the slightest, and we have written a lot about why this might happen.
“But between the GOP pivot away from the economy and immigration in favor of anti-transgender ads (which virtually nobody ranks as a top priority), and between a series of undisciplined comments from Trump and the folks in his orbit, he also seems intent on squandering every advantage he has in what remains a very winnable race,” they added.
“He has done himself no favors since Kamala Harris replaced Biden atop the ticket, and if he wins, it may well be in spite of the campaign he’s run, rather than because of it.”
Split Ticket said Harris is projected to win 270 Electoral College votes by beating Trump in the key swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. The battleground states of Nevada, North Carolina, and Georgia are still considered toss-ups, with Arizona leaning more toward the Republican.
The forecasters said the margins are still so close that either candidate could still win Tuesday’s neck-and-neck race.
“Even the tiniest polling error in favor of Donald Trump could hand him the presidency—after all, polls in Pennsylvania currently show him down by only half a percent, and we’ve seen high-profile misses bigger than that in both directions,” Split Ticket wrote.
The forecasters said factors such as abortion rights post Roe v. Wade being overturned by the Supreme Court could also play a role in Trump loss at this year’s election, similar to how the GOP severely underperformed at the 2022 midterms.
Split Ticket added that the recent Selzer Iowa poll—which had Harris ahead in the state Trump won twice by 47 percent to 44—shows abortion “continues to engender real backlash for the Republicans in socially liberal-to-moderate, pro-choice states,” particularly among women and college-educated voters.
“We still reiterate that this is a tossup, and one in which more pre-election uncertainty exists than perhaps any presidential election in recent memory,” Split Ticket said.
“But to the extent that we can extract any signal from this chaos of noise, we’d probably narrowly rather be Harris.”
The final forecaster models from FiveThirtyEight and veteran pollster Nate Silver also suggest Harris is the marginal favorite in what is essentially a 50/50 race.
Decision Desk HQ/The Hill’s forecast give Trump a 54 percent chance of winning the election, with the Republican projected to win 276 Electoral College votes.
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