Editor’s note (July 21st): Joe Biden has stepped down as the Democratic nominee. We have paused the forecast until we have sufficient polling data about his successor. Read more about what will come next.
Chance of winning the electoral college
Joe Biden has about a chance
Donald Trump has about a chance
2020 results
Note: Candidates often enjoy a polling surge after party conventions. Following the Republicans’ official nomination of Donald Trump on July 18th, any such boost will temporarily increase his win probability in our forecast.
Our model is updated every day and combines state and national polls with economic indicators to predict the election results across the country. To work out the probable electoral-vote totals, we run over 10,000 simulations of the election. The chance of a tie in the electoral college is less than 1 in 100.
We keep a running average of national head-to-head polls, which gives a sense of how the race is progressing. But winning the national popular vote is not enough to win the presidency.
In most states one party has a comfortable advantage, making them uncompetitive. These six states (worth 77 electoral votes) will be decisive. In 2016, Mr Trump carried five of the six; in 2020, Mr Biden won them all.
Which states are crucial to each candidate?
The key states are not equally important. Some are larger, and some lean more to one candidate or the other. Some are similar: for example, if one candidate wins Michigan, he is likely ahead in Wisconsin, too. We calculated each candidate’s chances to win should they lose these states.
Overall chance of winning
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Electoral votes
Change from 2020
As polls and economic data change, our model updates its predictions to account for them. You can see how the race has changed since the beginning of the campaign.
Methodology
The Economist’s model of America’s presidential election estimates each major candidate’s chances of winning each state and the overall electoral college. Developed with a team of scholars at Columbia University, the forecast combines national and state-level polls with fundamental data about the state of the economy, historical voting patterns and the demographics of each state to predict the likelihood of various outcomes of the race.
The model does this by constructing thousands of scenarios, each one containing different vote shares in each state and different values for the impact of polling biases and other characteristics. The model is more likely to generate scenarios that are closer to matching the polls and fundamental data it has been given. The win probabilities presented here represent the share of these scenarios won by each candidate.
For more details on exactly how the model accomplishes this and the thinking behind its design, read the full methodology.
Sources: American National Election Studies; Cooperative Congressional Election Study; FiveThirtyEight; Gallup; MIT Election and Data Science Lab; US Bureau of Economic Analysis; US Census Bureau; 270towin.com; YouGov
Forecast by The Economist with Andrew Gelman and colleagues at Columbia University
Christine Lagarde, President of the European Central Bank (ECB), comments on the central bank’s latest interest rate decision to journalists.
Photo by Andreas Arnold/picture alliance via Getty Images
European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde on Tuesday said she hoped that the prospect of U.S. President Donald Trump firing Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell was not on the table.
Asked by CNBC’s Sara Eisen if that scenario was a current material risk to markets, Lagarde said: “I certainly hope not … I hope that it is not a risk.”
Speaking on the sidelines of the IMF World Bank Spring Meetings, Lagarde told CNBC that she would not comment on the market implications of an event she hoped was “not on the table.”
U.S. President Donald Trump has been ramping up pressure on Fed Chairman Jerome Powell to reduce interest rates, warning the U.S. economy could slow down otherwise.
Powell had in turn last week suggested that Trump’s trade war could weigh on growth and fuel inflation. He did not indicate his expectations for the interest rate path ahead, but noted that “for the time being, we are well positioned to wait for greater clarity before considering any adjustments to our policy stance.”
Trump appointed Powell during his first presidential mandate, but is now looking into whether the Fed chief can legally be sacked before him term expires.
The ECB and the Fed have been diverging on monetary policy.
The euro area’s central bank has consistently cut rates as inflation closes in on its 2% target and economic growth in the bloc appears lackluster. The Fed has meanwhile been keeping rates steady this year, after enacting three consecutive cuts between September and December last year.
The ECB last week cut interest rates by a further 25 basis points, making its third reduction of 2025 and its seventh trim since it began easing monetary policy last summer. In its monetary policy statement, the central bank warned of a weakened growth outlook linked to the global trade uncertainty stoked by U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff policy.
Tariffs are posing major headwinds for the U.S. and global economies, leading the International Monetary Fund to slash its 2025 growth forecast.
President Donald Trump’s April 2 rollout of “reciprocal” tariffs has not only shaken stocks – the S&P 500 is down 9% since the levies were launched – but they also have set off countermeasures from other trading partners.
“This on its own is a major negative shock to growth,” the IMF said in the executive summary of its April 2025 World Economic Outlook.
This new outlook includes a “reference forecast” for global economic growth and inflation, based on data available as of April 4 — including the “reciprocal” tariffs but excluding subsequent developments like the 90-day pause on higher rates and the exemption on smartphones — and updates the earlier outlook the IMF shared in January.
In its new projections, the IMF now calls for a U.S. growth outlook of 1.8% in 2025, down 0.9 percentage point from its January forecast.
While it is not yet calling for a recession in the U.S., chief economist Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas told reporters Tuesday that the IMF now views recession odds at 40%, up from 25% in October.
The IMF also cut back its global growth forecast to 2.8% in 2025, down 0.5 percentage point from its previous estimate.
“The April 2 Rose Garden announcement forced us to jettison our projections — nearly finalized at that point — and compress a production cycle that usually takes more than two months into less than 10 days,” chief economist Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas wrote in the April report.
“The common denominator … is that tariffs are a negative supply shock for the economy imposing them,” he said.
Higher inflation forecasts for advanced economies
The IMF also revised its expectations for headline inflation for advanced economies, which include the U.S., the United Kingdom and Canada, to 2.5% for 2025, reflecting an increase of 0.4 percentage point from January’s projection.
The U.S. inflation outlook was also revised higher by 1 percentage point from January, where it was estimated above the 2% range.
“For the United States, this reflects stubborn price dynamics in the services sector as well as a recent uptick in the growth of the price of core goods (excluding food and energy) and the supply shock from recent tariffs,” the IMF noted in its April report.
The increase in inflation for major economies was offset by downward revisions across certain emerging markets and developing economies.
The extent to which the levies pressure central banks’ efforts to lower inflation is contingent “on whether the tariffs are perceived to be temporary or permanent,” according to the IMF’s report.
Previous bouts of market volatility have led to the U.S. dollar strengthening relative to other countries, creating upward inflationary pressure in other countries. However, the dollar has reversed this trend amid the recent market sell-off.
“The effect of tariffs on exchange rates is not straightforward,” per Gourinchas. “In the medium term, the dollar may depreciate in real terms if tariffs translate into lower productivity in the US tradables sector, relative to its trading partners.”
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Austan Goolsbee, President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, speaks to the Economic Club of New York in New York City, U.S., April 10, 2025.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
Business owners and CEOs are already stocking up on inventory, and some American shoppers are panic buying big-ticket items in anticipation of President Donald Trump’s tariffs. The sudden buying binge could cause an “artificially high” level of economic activity, said Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago President Austan Goolsbee.
“That kind of preemptive purchasing is probably even more pronounced on the business side,” Goolsbee told CBS’ “Face The Nation” on Sunday, adding: “We heard a lot about preemptive building-up of inventories that could last 60 days, 90 days, if there [was] going to be more uncertainty.”
Businesses stockpiling inventory and consumers accelerating their purchasing decisions — buying an Apple iPhone now, say, rather than waiting until the fall — may inflate U.S. economic activity in April and lead to a slowdown in the coming months, Goolsbee suggested.
“Activity might look artificially high in the initial, and then by the summer, might fall off — because people have bought it all,” he said.
Sectors affected by Trump’s tariffs, particularly the auto industry, are most likely to heavily stock up on inventory now before import levies on goods from other countries potentially rise further, said Goolsbee. Many car parts, electronic components and other big-ticket consumer items are manufactured in China, for example, which currently faces a 145% total tariff rate on goods imported to the United States.
“We don’t know, 90 days from now, when they’ve revisited the tariffs, we don’t know how big they’re going to be,” Goolsbee said.
Some U.S. business owners who buy goods manufactured in China say they already can’t afford to place rush orders on inventory. Matt Rollens, owner and CEO of Granite Bay, California-based novelty drinkware company Dragon Glassware, says he’s temporarily holding his products in China because paying the 145% levy would force him to raise consumer prices by at least 50%, likely drying up customer demand.
Rollens has enough inventory in the U.S. to last roughly until June, and hopes the tariffs will be rolled back by then, he told CNBC Make It on April 11.
Short-term uncertainty and financial pain aside, the Fed’s Goolsbee expressed optimism about the country’s longer-term economic outlook.
“If we can get through this, it’s important to remember: The hard data coming into April was pretty good. The unemployment rate [was] around steady full employment, inflation [was] coming down,” he said. “It’s just a desire of people expressing they don’t want to back to ’21 and ’22, at a time when inflation was really raging out of control.”