2024 U.S. Federal Elections Forecast by 538/ABC News

An interactive project presenting findings from an election forecasting model for the 2024 U.S. presidential, House, and Senate elections.

538's forecast this year was based on new modeling and revamped designs to emphasize the uncertainty inherent in polling data — a hotly discussed topic after America's last several election cycles. In addition to creating a new statistical model more rooted in academic Bayesian approaches, we designed a new homepage to draw readers' attention to the uncertainty in our world (shown via our histograms of potential outcomes of each race) and the stochastic nature of polling and election prediction. Overall, we wanted our project to express one important point: Polls are likely to miss the actual result of the election, but we don't know how far off they'll be or in which direction. Based on how polls have been wrong historically, and what they show now, here's what could happen in the election.

We also wanted readers to come away with a sense of where the election mattered, without skewing perceptions of electoral geography based on differences in population density across states. This led us to design a new map of states that showed each state's geographic borders and its allotted votes in the Electoral College simultaneously. While a popular alternative approach uses circles to represent EC vote weight, we used blocks, which have the benefit of proportionality and matching real-world EC vote counts (which are integers). It was important to us editorially that people understood, for example, that relatively small states in the purple middle of America would be the ones deciding this election, not the blue or red states on the extremes, and not the large states where most residents live. We redesigned 538's famous "snake chart" to further emphasize this point and modernize our design.

As polls are ubiquitous and increasingly cited in election coverage, we think it's crucial for news outlets to have an informed approach to contextualizing the data. It is our view that election forecasting models and polling averages, free from partisan bias and editorial intervention, offer an objective way to streamline information processing for journalists and audiences.