Uncertainty prevails on Election Day.

Henry Olsen predicts a Trump win. Nate Silver's model calls it "closer than a coin-flip."

Henry Olsen is a top-notch political analyst and forecaster. His forecasts aren’t always right. If I recall correctly, he was wrong about the 2022 elections. However, his forecasts are always worth taking seriously.

Olsen predicts that Trump will win this election and might even win the popular vote. He predicts that Republicans will gain control of the Senate, and with considerably more than 51 seats. He also sees the GOP retaining control of the House.

On the presidential race, Olsen writes:

I did my own examination of the national likely voter polls and averaged their partisan crosstabs together. I found that Harris leads with Democrats by 89 points (94%-5%) while Trump leads with Republicans by 87 points (93%-6%). Harris leads among independents by a mere 2 points (48%-46%). Assuming Democrats and Republicans will have equal share of the electorate, and independents are their typical 30%, that means Harris wins the popular vote by a mere 1.3 points.

This is likely an insufficient margin for Harris to win because of the way Trump’s coalition punches above its weight in the Electoral College. His blue-collar, white-heavy voting bloc is a larger share of the vote in the all-important states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

That’s why he could beat Hillary Clinton, winning all three of these states, in 2016 even as he lost the popular vote by 2.1 points.

Trump nearly won the Electoral College again in 2020 even though he lost the popular vote by 4.45 points. Had he lost by only 3.7 points, assuming a uniform shift among the states, he would have carried Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin and won a very narrow Electoral College majority.

Looking at the closest states, Olsen finds:

Trump leads in five of the seven swing states, trailing in Wisconsin by 0.2 points and Michigan by 0.5.

There’s good reason to think the state polls in Wisconsin underestimate Trump. Pollster Patrick Ruffini found the state had the largest polling errors in 2016 and in 2020, both favoring Democrats by 3 points or more. He also found that as of September, the polls still appeared to be overstating Harris by 2.6 points.

Olsen concludes that Trump win will six of the seven swing states — all but Michigan.

Is he right? I have no clear idea. There are too many things I don’t know.

Have the pollsters fully corrected for their past bias against Trump? No idea. Have they overcorrected such that they will underestimate the Democrats as they did in 2022? Maybe.

Is Trump’s unorthodox get-out-the-vote system working well? No idea. Will voter fraud tilt the result in favor of the Democrats? Not unless the race is extremely close. But it might be extremely close.

Has Harris gained momentum in recent days? It seems so. How much? Who knows? Maybe that comedian’s crack about Puerto Rico hurt Trump. How much? No idea.

The betting markets give Trump the edge. Recently they had the race at around 60-40 for Trump. However, the odds in his favor seem to be dropping.

Nate Silver has the race a dead heat. As recently as last Friday, he gave Trump a 54 percent chance of winning. But this morning, when he ran 80,000 simulations of the race, Kamala Harris won the Electoral College in 40,012 of them, or 50.015 percent. The remaining 39,988 were split between Trump (39,718) and no majority — a 269-269 tie. In the event of a 259-269 tie, the race would be decided in the House, where Trump would probably win due to the voting system used there.

No such uncertainty exists when it comes to forecasting the Senate. The GOP almost certainly will gain control of that chamber.

Olsen thinks Republicans will win exceed the 51 seats required for control in a Harris administration:

If Trump wins Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, as I think he will, the Republican senatorial candidates should also win their races. Coupled with pickups in the last three states Trump won in 2020 where Democrats hold Senate seats — Montana, Ohio and West Virginia — Republicans will gain six seats and hold a 55-45 majority, tying their post-1930 high.

(Emphasis added)

This seems too optimistic to me.

In the event of such a majority, will the filibuster be eliminated? I hope not, but it’s possible. Trump would certainly exert maximum pressure to achieve this. In any case, a 55-seat majority would provide good protection against the Democrats recapturing the Senate in 2026.

Olsen predicts that Republicans will keep control of the House and, indeed, increase their majority by three to seven seats. If the GOP does as well as Olsen predicts it will at the national level, his House forecast makes sense. But if he’s off by even a little bit, control of the House might shift to the Democrats.

I usually end same-day posts about elections by saying, we’ll know very soon. But even that’s not clear. This year, it may be days before we know who won the presidency.

This long nightmare of an election season might not be over for a while.