Nate Silver's final forecast: "As close as you can possibly get to 50/50"

When Nate Silver says the election is "closer than a coin flip," he's basing it on hard numbers — heads empirically win 50.5 percent of the time, a greater margin than Vice President Kamala Harris' 50.15 percent chance of winning the superstar election handicapper's final forecast.

Harris won is slightly greater than 50 percent of the 80,000 times Silver ran electoral college simulations. Notably, that is twice as many simulations as he normally runs.

“When I say the odds in this year’s presidential race are about as close as you can possibly get to 50/50, I’m not exaggerating,” he said. In six out of the seven crucial battleground states, the model's polling average holds Harris and former President Donald Trump within 1.2 percent of each other. Only in Arizona does Trump maintain "something resembling a clear lead."

The final predicted electoral college count gives Harris 271 votes to Trump's 267 — the same margin between George W. Bush and Al Gore in 2000.

Two weeks ago, Silver wrote in a New York Times op-ed that the race was just as close, but if he was forced to pick a candidate to win, his "gut" would suggest Trump. But he cautioned at the time that people "shouldn't put any value" in gut feeling, and that they should resign themselves "to the fact that a 50-50 forecast really does mean 50-50."

While Harris enjoyed a surge of momentum following her entry into the race, Trump seemed to regain the initiative in the battleground states during most of October. In the final week of the race, however, a slew of polls showed Harris edging ahead once again.

Other polling aggregators show a similarly tight race, with The Economist showing Harris winning 56 times out of 100 simulations, and FiveThirtyEight, which Silver used to manage, giving Harris a 50 percent chance of winning to Trump's 49 percent. Some observers maintain that there's a possibility of an unexpected blowout on either side, with Harris supporters crowing over a highly-rated Iowa poll that showed Harris 3 points ahead of Trump, who won the state by 8 points in 2020.