Who Is Favored To Win The 2024 Presidential Election? (2025)

UPDATED Jun. 30, 2024, at 11:13 AM

538 uses polling, economic and demographic data to explore likely election outcomes.

With 133 days until Election Day, our forecast still sees the presidential race as a pure toss-up. Right now, President Joe Biden is favored to win in XXX out of 1,000 of our model’s simulations of how the election could go, while former President Donald Trump wins in XXX of our simulations. There is still a small chance of the pure chaos scenario: In XXX simulations, no candidate wins a majority of Electoral College votes, which would throw the election to the House of Representatives.

Last week, Biden “pulled ahead” of Trump in our averages of national presidential election polls for the first time this cycle. I put “pulled ahead” in scare quotes because his margin topped out at just +0.3 percentage points — squarely within our model’s uncertainty interval for the state of public opinion today. The rising national tide has lifted Biden’s boat in Michigan and Wisconsin, too, though Trump still edges him out in Pennsylvania. Our model’s current estimate of the gap between the winning candidate’s margin nationally and in the Electoral College is currently D+1.4 points — meaning Biden needs to win the national popular vote by 1.4 points to be favored to win a majority of electoral votes.

On Thursday, June 27, CNN will host the first televised debate of the cycle between Biden and Trump. This will be the first big opportunity for the candidates to shake up the race; since 1976, in the two weeks after the first debate of the cycle, the margin between the two candidates in polls has changed by 2.4 percentage points on average, and up to 5 points in rare cases. But since Biden and Trump are known quantities, whether either candidate can really make a splash is doubtful. Check back over the next week to see how our model reacts to the first post-debate polls.

538’s forecast is based on a combination of polls and campaign “fundamentals,” such as economic conditions, state partisanship and incumbency. It’s not meant to “call” a winner, but rather to give you a sense of how likely each candidate is to win. Check out our methodology to learn exactly how we calculate these probabilities.

—G. Elliott Morris

Maine and Nebraska’s congressional districts are shown separately because those states split their Electoral College votes, allotting two to the statewide winner and one to the winner of each district.

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