Pollster Nate Silver says Vice President Harris missed a big opportunity to win over centrist voters when she passed over Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro (D) as her running mate.

Harris “missed a huge opportunity to move to the center by choosing Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) over Josh Shapiro: The fact that a tiny minority of progressives objected to Shapiro was, if anything, an argument in Shapiro’s favor,” Silver wrote in a post on his website.

Shapiro and Walz, along with Arizona Democratic Senator Mark Kelly, rose to the top of the “vice presidential candidates” list while Harris weighed who to bring into her accelerated race after President Biden dropped out of the race.

Walz, who garnered viral clips calling Republican rivals “weird,” is seen as helping Harris reach out to the Midwest and middle class. The election has also energized progressives after Walz moved left during his time in office.

However, Silver argues that Shapiro, who is criticized by progressive politicians, could have been a help to Harris. The pollster claims Harris is “limited by her own progressive policy positions in the past.”

Nearly half of voters in a new poll by the New York Times and Siena College said Harris seemed “too liberal/progressive.”

The election of Walz shows the vice president’s “counterproductive tendency toward risk aversion,” Silver said.

“I think Walz was a pretty good choice on his own merits, but when given the opportunity to send a concrete signal about the direction of her presidency, she fell back into 2019 mode,” he wrote, referring to Harris’ campaign in the 2020 election cycle, in which she notably supported several progressive policies.

She has been criticized for her reversals on issues such as Medicare for All and banning fracking, both of which she no longer supports. Those policy changes have come into the spotlight as she courts moderate voters in a tight race with former President Trump.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said over the weekend that he still considers Harris a progressive, even though she has moved more to the center on some issues, arguing that they still share the same goals, such as universal health care and combating climate change.

Silver’s latest comment comes shortly after a Times/Siena poll found former President Trump leading Harris by one percentage point among likely voters. That figure is within the poll’s three percentage point margin of error and essentially unchanged from a poll conducted immediately after Democrats moved onto the voting rolls.

Harris has ridden a wave of enthusiasm from Democrats since launching her candidacy just weeks ago, closing some of Biden’s gaps in key polls. Silver’s polling averages also show Harris leading Trump by about two percentage points nationally — but the pollster now predicts she has a 20 percent chance of winning a majority of the vote and losing the Electoral College.

Harris and Trump will face off in their first debate on Tuesday. The former president has already debated Biden, whose poor performance on the podium was seen as a reason for his exit from the race. The planned face-off will be high-stakes for both candidates just weeks before Election Day.

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