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Trump and Biden are tied in 538's new election forecast
Today 538 published our official forecast for the 2024 presidential election. The model builds on our general election polling averages by asking not just what our best guess is about who is leading the presidential race today, but what range of outcomes are possible for the actual election in November. At least once per day, we’ll rerun our simulations of the election with the latest data, so bookmark our interactive and check back often.
At launch, our forecast shows President Joe Biden locked in a practically tied race with former President Donald Trump, both in the Electoral College and national popular vote. Specifically, our model reckons Biden has a 53-in-100 chance of winning the election, meaning he wins in slightly more than half of our model’s simulations of how the election could unfold. However, Trump still has a 47-in-100 chance, so this election could still very much go either way. The range of realistic* Electoral College outcomes generated by our forecasting model stretches from 132 to 445 electoral votes for Biden — a testament to how much things could change by November (and how off the polls could be).
Our model is brand new this year, with tons of bells and whistles and modern statistical tools that you can read all about in our methodology post. Here, I’ll give you the non-wonky version of how the forecast works, offer a few tips on how to read it and explain why we think forecasts are valuable in the first place.
How we forecast
To forecast the election, we rely primarily on polls asking voters whom they support. However, our forecast also incorporates various economic and political indicators that aren’t related to polling but can be used to make rough predictions for the election. For example, we have calculated an index of economic growth and optimism on every day since 1944, gathered historical approval ratings for every president since Franklin D. Roosevelt and derived a formula for predicting state election outcomes using these and other local factors. We also tested whether incumbent presidents do better when they run for reelection (they do) and whether all of these factors are less predictive of voters’ choices when political polarization is high (they are).
Right now, Trump leads Biden in most polls of the swing states that will decide the election, but the “fundamentals” favor Biden. The combined polls-plus-fundamentals forecast splits the difference between these two viewpoints and arrives at an essentially deadlocked race. Here’s what it looks like on the state level:
At this point in the race, our margin of error for these state forecasts is huge. There are two reasons for this: First, it is early. As pollsters are bound to remind you many times between now and November, polls are snapshots of public opinion as it stands today, not predictions of vote share in the eventual election. To the extent they are predictions at all, they predict how people would vote if an election were held today — which, of course, it will not be.
In part, this oft-repeated caveat is a convenient way for pollsters to avoid catching flak for inaccurate numbers closer to the election. But there is an important truth to it: If a voter has not yet cast their ballot, there is the possibility they may change their mind. We also don’t know exactly who is going to turn out in this election yet. All this means polls earlier in the election cycle are worse at approximating the final margin.
This is where forecasting models really become useful. Above everything else, 538 makes forecasts to quantify the uncertainty inherent in the election. Our study of historical presidential election polls finds that the margin between the two candidates shifts by an average of 9 percentage points between June and November. In practical terms, that means today’s polls have a true margin of error of close to 20 points. And while recent elections have not had as much volatility, we can’t assume 2024 will be the same way; it’s possible that this year will be closer to the historical norm.
The second major source of error is the chance that polls systematically underestimate one of the candidates, as happened in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. We estimate that, even on Election Day, state-level polling averages of presidential general elections have an expected error of 4 points on the margin — meaning if the candidates are tied in the polling average, then on average we’d expect one to win by 4, and in rare cases they could win by 8!
Why forecast, anyway?
Having such wide margins of error is not our way of absolving ourselves of responsibility if the election result is surprising. It’s our way of giving you, the reader, a more informed understanding of the range of potential election outcomes than you’d get from a single poll (or even a polling average).
Over the last decade, it has become common to view election forecasting — and even polling — as purely making predictions of “what will happen” in the election. But we think forecasting models serve a greater journalistic purpose than a focus on prediction gives them credit for. For us here at 538, forecasting is an exercise in quantifying the reliability of various indicators of public opinion. Yes, that involves making predictions, but the real value of our work is the statistical analysis of the reliability of the numbers you are bound to see plastered all over print news media, social media and television over the next five months.
We think this is a different goal from making predictions for prediction’s sake, or making a model that can “call” every state correctly. If you want someone to give you a prediction of who will win the election with absolute certainty, then look elsewhere. (And buyer beware.)
Instead, we think we offer a unique product that can help you be smarter about the way you think about the range of outcomes for the election. As the stakes of our politics increase, a carefully calibrated sense of what could realistically happen in November — in our case, from a forecast that properly distinguishes between normal and tail risk — becomes increasingly valuable.
How to read the forecast
On that note, I’ll end with a few tips on how to read our forecast responsibly:
Watch the distributions. Our model simulates thousands of possible Electoral College outcomes based on the historical predictive error of the indicators we rely on. The top of our forecast page has a histogram of a random subset of these simulations, showing you which outcomes are likelier than others. We hope you get the impression that there is a wide potential range of outcomes, given all the error we’re talking about.
Unlikely does not mean impossible. In 2020, polls performed worse than in any election since 1980. The average state-level poll conducted in the last three weeks of that election overestimated Biden’s vote margin by 4.6 points — about 1.5 times the average 3-point bias for presidential elections since 1972. In a backtest of our current model, we would have assigned about a 20 percent chance to Biden winning 306 electoral votes (the number he actually won) or fewer in 2020. We think a similar miss this year would be statistically surprising, but a possibility people should mentally prepare for.
Changes in public opinion take time. We have done our best to make a model that reacts the appropriate amount to new polling data. “Appropriate” here means that the model will be conservative early on or when polls are bouncing generally around the same level, but also that it will be aggressive when polls appear to be moving uniformly across states — especially late in the campaign. However, as a properly Bayesian statistical model, the program that runs our forecast generates some amount of uncertainty about the parameters, resulting in unavoidable random error across our simulations. This means polling averages can change by a few decimal places day to day — and probabilities may jitter by around a point, which cascades down into uncertainty in our model. Don’t sweat these small changes; instead, pay attention to bigger changes in the model over longer stretches of time.
Use all the information you (reasonably) can. Polls are reasonably good predictors of election outcomes. In fact, asking people how they are going to vote is about the best single source of information you can get if your goal is to figure out how people might vote. But polls are not the only source of information available to us. 538’s forecast incorporates demographics, polls and the “fundamentals” all the way up to Election Day; our research has found this decreases the chance for uniform bias in our forecast.
Our forecast assumes normal election rules still apply. This is an important disclaimer about what our model is intended to do and what it is not. Because our model is trained on historical polling and election results, it is not intended to account for violations of normal political and election rules. We assume, for example, that if a voter legally casts a ballot, it will be counted accurately and fairly; that the electors a state elects to vote for a certain candidate in the Electoral College get to do so; that their votes are ultimately recognized by Congress; and that, as an extreme example, the election is administered on time, where officials say it will be administered and generally that people who show up to vote will be able to.
That is not to say that we dismiss the possibility of rule-breaking. From an editorial perspective, we stand ready to cover any attempts to undermine a free and fair election. But as a quantitative matter, our forecast is intended to explain variance in election outcomes based on the polls and other indicators, to serve as a supplement to polling averages and to put other political journalism in its proper context.
Footnotes
*Within the 95 percent confidence interval.
A man sings a spirtual song during a voting rally, Saturday, May 16, 2026, in Montgomery, Ala.
Mike Stewart/AP
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Mike Stewart/AP
MONTGOMERY, Ala.— In 1965, Black Americans peacefully demonstrated for voting rights and were beaten by Alabama state troopers before returning two weeks later to complete their march under federal protection. Keith Odom was a toddler then.
Now 62 years old, the union man and grandfather of three retraced some of their final steps. On Saturday, he came from Aiken, South Carolina, to Atlanta, where he joined several dozen other activists on two buses to Montgomery, Alabama. A few hours later, he stepped off his bus and onto Dexter Avenue, where the original march concluded.
“The history here — being a part of it, seeing it, feeling it,” said Odom, who is Black.
His voice trailed off as he saw the Alabama Capitol and a stage that sat roughly where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. concluded the original march.
Odom lamented that he and his fellow bus riders were not simply commemorating that seminal day in the Civil Rights Movement. Instead they came to renew the fight. The 1965 effort helped push Congress to send the Voting Rights Act to Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson to sign, securing and expanding political power for Black and other nonwhite voters for more than a half-century.
Saturday’s “All Roads Lead to the South” rally was the first mass organizing response after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that severely diminished that landmark law. Striking down a majority Black congressional district in Louisiana, the justices concluded in a 6-3 ruling that considering race when drawing political lines is in itself discriminatory. That spurred multiple states, including Alabama, to redraw U.S. House districts in ways that make it harder for Black voters, who lean overwhelmingly Democratic, to elect lawmakers of their choice.
“I’m not trying to live a life that’s going backwards,” Odom said. “I want to go forward, for my grandchildren to be able to go forward.”
Keith Odom, a forklift driver from Aiken, S.C., looks out from his bus seat as he arrives in Montgomery, Ala., for a voting rights rally Saturday, May 16, 2026.
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Bill Barrow/AP
An old political battle is new again
The passenger rosters and the scene when riders arrived in Montgomery sounded the echoes and rhymes of past and present.
“I talked to my grandmother before I came, and she was so excited,” said Justice Washington, a Kennesaw State University student named because her mother and grandmother had faith in the American system. “My grandmother told me she did her part, and now it’s time for me to do mine.”
No one on the Atlanta buses had reached voting age when the Voting Rights Act became law. The youngest attendee was born as Democrat Barack Obama was elected the first Black president in 2008.
Kobe Chernushin is 18, white and just graduated high school in Atlanta’s northern suburbs. He is an organizer with the Georgia Youth Justice Coalition and spent the day filming Khayla Doby, a 29-year-old executive for the organization, doing standups for the group’s followers on social media.
“I believe in the power of showing up,” he said.
The buses launched from the congressional district in Georgia once represented by John Lewis, bloodied on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, when he was 25. Lewis died in 2020, but some on the buses Saturday celebrated that a proposed federal election overhaul is named for him. If some Democrats get their way, the bill would override the U.S. Supreme Court, reinvigorate the Voting Rights Act and outlaw the kind of gerrymandering competition that Republican President Donald Trump has instigated.
“I’m here because of the same forces that pulled on John Lewis when he was a student,” said Darrin Owens, 27. He has worked for former Vice President Kamala Harris and now trains Democratic candidates.
“Political activism is personal,” Owens said, explaining that he attended Saturday as a citizen, not a political professional. “Sometimes those lines are blurred, and as a Black person in America, a Black person living in a Southern state, I’m committed to action that stops what I consider to be un-American, this possibility that the person who represents me is someone who is not from my community and does not understand me or my community.”
When he arrived, Owens saw no federal authorities on Montgomery’s streets. A wounded, recovering Lewis did during the second march in 1965.
This time many of the Alabama troopers and local officers who walked the area were Black.
The buses and sandwich lunches had been arranged by Fair Fight Action, a legacy of the political network built by Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams, who became a national figure in her unsuccessful runs in 2018 and 2022 to become the first Black woman elected governor in U.S. history. No Black woman has yet achieved that feat.
Bee Nguyen, left, talks to Carole Burton, center, and Tondalaire Ashford at a voting rights rally Saturday, May 16, 2026, in Montgomery, Ala.
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Different generations share their stories
At different points, Montgomery has branded itself as the cradle of the Confederacy and the cradle of the modern Civil Rights Movement.
“It feels like our country is stuck in this pattern of making progress, then there’s a huge backlash, and then people have to go through the same battle again just to get to where we were,” said Phi Nguyen, the 41-year-old daughter of Vietnamese refugees. She is now a civil rights lawyer in Atlanta.
She stood across from the church where a young King led the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 and not far from where Jefferson Davis took the oath of office in 1861 as the slavery-defending Confederate president.
Nguyen and her sister Bee, a 44-year-old who served in the Georgia General Assembly and ran for statewide office, met two other women as they walked. Carole Burton and Tondalaire Ashford are 72-year-old Montgomery residents who have been friends since they were in a segregated junior high school and then newly desegregated Sidney Lanier High School.
“I don’t call it ‘integration,’” Ashford said, pointing at her dark skin. “It was never real integration, and it’s not like we can ever just blend in.”
Burton described them as being “in the second wave” of Black students. “It wasn’t easy,” she said. “And we had to support each other.”
They remember their parents not being able to vote in the era of poll taxes, literacy tests and other racist restrictions that the Voting Rights Act eventually outlawed. But they smiled as they swapped family histories with the Nguyens.
Burton said immigrants, descendants of enslaved persons and Native Americans have different but overlapping paths. “We just want to be treated like people with the same rights and opportunities the country has promised us,” she said. “They’ve never fully lived up to it.”
Aaron McGuire sings a spirtual song during a voting rally, Saturday, May 16, 2026, in Montgomery, Ala.
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Mike Stewart/AP
Conflicting legacies are at stake
To Odom, who had begun his journey Saturday in South Carolina, the current U.S. Supreme Court reinforced that history by refusing to see some race-conscious election policy as a way to ensure fair representation, not simply the “technical right to vote.”
He recalls decades of his life being represented by Strom Thurmond, a segregationist Democratic governor who became a “Dixiecrat” presidential candidate and U.S. senator — by now as a Republican — into the 21st century. Odom said he fears his state losing U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn, a senior member of the Congressional Black Caucus, through redistricting.
“They want to take away that legacy when we’re still living with Strom’s?” Odom said.
Odom said he is also worried that the young people who participated Saturday are not a vanguard but outliers.
“I was talking to a 20-year-old co-worker about this trip,” he said. “She told me she supported me but didn’t want to do it or work for anybody” running for office. “She wondered what any of them are going to do for her.”
Nonetheless, he said on the way home, “I’m still going to tell her what I saw and what I heard.”
One observer of the current Senate race in Louisiana noted that Sen. Bill Cassidy could lose his reelection bid.
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Annie Flanagan for NPR
Sen. Bill Cassidy lost Saturday’s Louisiana Republican primary according to a race call by the Associated Press.
Cassidy, who served two terms in the Senate, was one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict President Trump after the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol. That vote put him at odds with Trump and his MAGA coalition, ultimately leading Trump to push Rep. Julia Letlow to run against Cassidy.
Cassidy’s bid for a third term was viewed as a test of Trump’s grip on the party–and of what voters want from their representatives in Washington. The primary pitted Cassidy, a veteran lawmaker, former physician and chair of the powerful Senate health committee, against Letlow, a political newcomer and a millennial MAGA loyalist.
A detailed view of a hat that reads, Run Julia Run, is seen at a campaign event for Rep. Julia Letlow (R-LA) on May 6, 2026 in Franklinton, Louisiana.
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A former college administrator, Letlow won a special election in 2021 for the House seat her late husband, Luke, was set to assume before he died from COVID in 2020.
In Congress, Letlow sponsored a bill to collect oral histories from the pandemic and has focused on education and children. She introduced the “Parents Bill of Rights Act,” which would allow parents to review classroom materials like library books and require schools to notify parents if their child requests different pronouns, locker rooms or sports teams.
She also serves on the powerful appropriations committee and has embraced Trump’s agenda.
Letlow, who came first in Saturday’s primary, will face Louisiana state Treasurer John Fleming in the runoff on June 27. Cassidy came in third.
The election result is a victory for President Trump who has put Republican loyalty to the test on the ballot so far this year in Indiana state senate primaries and in Cassidy’s race.
Another major test of Trump’s influence comes in Kentucky’s primary on Tuesday when Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, who has found himself at odds with the president, faces a challenger endorsed by Trump.
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Brass bands in Beijing make way for sticker shock at home as Trump returns to escalating inflation
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump returned from the spectacle of a Chinese state visit to a less than welcoming U.S. economy — with the military band and garden tour in Beijing giving way to pressure over how to fix America’s escalating inflation rate.
Consumer inflation in the United States increased to 3.8% annually in April, higher than what he inherited as the Iran war and the Republican president’s own tariffs have pushed up prices. Inflation is now outpacing wage gains and effectively making workers poorer. The Cleveland Federal Reserve estimates that annual inflation could reach 4.2% in May as the war has kept oil and gasoline prices high.
Trump’s time with Chinese leader Xi Jinping appears unlikely to help the U.S. economy much, despite Trump’s claims of coming trade deals. The trip occurred as many people are voting in primaries leading into the November general election while having to absorb the rising costs of gasoline, groceries, utility bills, jewelry, women’s clothing, airplane tickets and delivery services. Democrats see the moment as a political opportunity.
“He’s returning to a dumpster fire,” said Lindsay Owens, executive director of Groundwork Collaborative, a liberal think tank focused on economic issues. “The president will not have the faith and confidence of the American people — the economy is their top issue and the president is saying, ‘You’re on your own.’”
The president’s trip to Beijing and his recent comments that indicated a tone-deafness to voters’ concerns about rising prices have suggested his focus is not on the American public and have undermined Republicans who had intended to campaign on last year’s tax cuts as helping families.
Trump described the trip as a victory, saying on social media that Xi “congratulated me on so many tremendous successes,” as the U.S. president has praised their relationship.
Trump told reporters that Boeing would be selling 200 aircraft — and maybe even 750 “if they do a good job” — to the Chinese. He said American farmers would be “very happy” because China would be “buying billions of dollars of soybeans.”
“We had an amazing time,” Trump said as he flew home on Air Force One, and told Fox News’ Bret Baier in an interview that gasoline prices were just some “short-term pain” and would “drop like a rock” once the war ends.
Inflationary pain is not a factor in how Trump handles Iran
Trump departed from the White House for China by saying the negotiations over the Iran war depended on stopping Tehran from developing nuclear weapons. “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said.
That remark prompted blowback because it suggested to some that Trump cared more about challenging Iran than fighting inflation at home. Trump defended his words, telling Fox News: “That’s a perfect statement. I’d make it again.”
The White House has since stressed that Trump is focused on inflation.
Asked later about the president’s words, Vice President JD Vance said there had been a “misrepresentation” of the remarks. White House spokesman Kush Desai said the “administration remains laser-focused on delivering growth and affordability on the homefront” while indicating actions would be taken on grocery prices.
But as Trump appeared alongside Xi, new reports back home showed inflation rising for businesses and interest rates climbing on U.S. government debt.
His comments that Boeing would sell 200 jets to China caused the company’s stock price to fall because investors had expected a larger number. There was little concrete information offered about any trade agreements reached during the summit, including Chinese purchases of U.S. exports such as liquefied natural gas and beef.
“Foreign policy wins can matter politically, but only if voters feel stability and affordability in their daily lives,” said Brittany Martinez, a former Republican congressional aide who is the executive director of Principles First, a center-right advocacy group focused on democracy issues.
“Midterms are almost always a referendum on cost of living and public frustration, and Republicans are not immune from the same inflation and affordability pressures that hurt Democrats in recent cycles,” she added.
Democrats see Trump as vulnerable
Democratic lawmakers are seizing on Trump’s comments before his trip as proof of his indifference to lowering costs. There is potential staying power of his remarks as Americans head into Memorial Day weekend facing rising prices for the hamburgers and hot dogs to be grilled.
“What Americans do not see is any sympathy, any support, or any plan from Trump and congressional Republicans to lower costs – in fact, they see the opposite,” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York said Thursday.
Vance faulted the Biden administration for the inflation problem even though the inflation rate is now higher than it was when Trump returned to the White House in January 2025 with a specific mandate to fix it.
“The inflation number last month was not great,” Vance said Wednesday, but he then stressed, “We’re not seeing anything like what we saw under the Biden administration.”
Inflation peaked at 9.1% in June 2022 under Biden, a Democrat. By the time Trump took the oath of office, it was a far more modest 3%.
Trump’s inflation challenge could get harder
The data tells a different story as higher inflation is spreading into the cost of servicing the national debt.
Over the past week, the interest rate charged on 10-year U.S. government debt jumped from 4.36% to 4.6%, an increase that implies higher costs for auto loans and mortgages.
“My fear is that the layers of supply shocks that are affecting the U.S. economy will only further feed into inflationary pressures,” said Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY-Parthenon.
Daco noted that last year’s tariff increases were now translating into higher clothing prices. With the Supreme Court ruling against Trump’s ability to impose tariffs by declaring an economic emergency, his administration is preparing a new set of import taxes for this summer.
Daco stressed that there have been a series of supply shocks. First, tariffs cut into the supply of imports. In addition, Trump’s immigration crackdown cut into the supply of foreign-born workers. Now, the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz has cut off the vital waterway used to ship 20% of global oil supplies.
“We’re seeing an erosion of growth,” Daco said.
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