Nate Silver still trying to deny momentum

We are now on about week three of Silver suggesting that we are only seeing small if not insignificant movement and the race remains a toss-up

Last update: 1:45 p.m., Sunday, October 20. The data continues to be pretty negative for Kamala Harris. There are now three recent high-quality national polls that show Donald Trump leading — a difficult circumstance for Harris, given Democrats’ Electoral College disadvantage — and her edge in our national polling average is down to 1.7 points. National polls don’t influence the model that much, and the race remains basically a toss-up, but it’s not hard to think of reasons that Trump could win.

Part of me goes back to history here. Back in 2016 Hillary Clinton led by well over five points for most of the election season, but the numbers closed to just over 3% in the final RCP averages (she won by just over 2%). In 2020, Joe Biden led much of the election cycle by double digits or near double digits, but those numbers also closed to just around 7% in the final RCP averages (he won by just over 4%). So it doesn't necessarily surprise me that Harris' 3-4-point lead would also fade down the stretch. Even her own campaign has suggested that polls showing her ahead by any real margin are wrong based on their internal numbers.

But either way I am not sure why people like Silver are attempting to discount these changes as some sort of nuisance and barely relevant to the bigger picture. It's clear from everything happening that any confidence Democrats and their operatives had in a Harris victory has been waning and waning quite fast. One might argue that it has been replaced with doubt, or even "panic" as many are suggesting. The fact that Silver's election model is not keeping up with the same level of internal doubt that we see coming from those in the know suggest more of a problem with the modeling than with those who have more at stake than a reputation as a prognosticator.