I don’t follow polls closely but I do follow trends. Consider the graph above of the head-to-head contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. When viewed over the last year, there is no trend. Lots of noise but neither candidate is distinctly improving or deteriorating in her/his standing. That lack of a trend explains a good deal of why I think as I do that ultimately Sec. Clinton will be elected president.
Sec. Clinton has a floor of support at around 43%. Donald Trump has a ceiling of support at around 45%. The next couple of weeks will be telling. If Clinton’s floor erodes or Trump breaks through his ceiling things will look a lot different.
Don’t expect Sec. Clinton to get a majority of the popular vote. Only one winning Democratic candidate have done that in the last half century—Barack Obama. The opposite has tended to be true for winning Republican candidates, i.e. they need popular majorities to win the Presidency. Sec. Clinton can win without a popular majority based on electoral vote count.
Despite all the sound and fury the election is likely to turn on a handful of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, Florida, Colorado. As of this writing Trump has established a lead in Ohio and Florida; Clinton holds her lead in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Colorado.
And as I’ve been saying for the last year, this year will be a turnout election. Regardless of what the polls say going in to election day, the candidate who gets his or her voters to turn out and vote is going to win.
Let’s see. It’s Tuesday? Probably a new set of polls out……..with drastically different results. Polls are now like economic data, to be inspected very carefully.
I’ll bet one of those shiny new dimes that, yes, turnout becomes the dominating variable.
Colorado. This is 538’s unadjusted average of the polls:
39.4% Clinton
36.2% Trump
13.4% Johnson
This seems like a very difficult state to predict. Not only is the Libertarian candidate doing well, Stein is also getting 2 to 7 percent herself in recent polls, and not getting the same analytical treatment. Johnson and Stein supporters might gravitate to the lesser evil candidate, or might not. Clinton’s ceiling in the polls since July has been 41%, and Trump’s 43%, but Trump’s floor has been lower (28%) than Clintion’s (36%).
Colorado is my home state and the polls are not surprising. Most of the rural areas are mostly Trump. The Front Range urban areas are mostly Clinton, particularly given all the new people who’ve moved to the state in the last 10 years (primarily from blue states). Johnson is doing well for a few reasons – libertarians mesh better with the mountain west’s independent culture; Johnson was governor of an adjacent state; Johnson likes pot, Colorado likes pot.
I expect Clinton to win the election as well, but it won’t be a strong victory, particularly in terms of the popular vote. It will be hard for her to argue that she has any kind of mandate if her vote total is in the low 40’s.
Still, anything can happen. A bad week for Clinton and a good week for Trump right before the election could make things interesting. I still plan to vote for Johnson as I cannot, in good conscious, vote for either of the other two and I don’t subscribe to the “lesser of two evils” voting strategy nonsense.
I am tending towards Trump winning. Hillary is an awful campaigner. Trump may be an ignorant liar and a fraud, but he knows how to play to the public.
Steve
steve,
In a sense, it’s like that “women are from mars and men are from venus” book except Trump is the one from Venus since his campaign is based on emotional appeals and instinct while Clinton is from Mars since she is the fixer, aka the policy wonk.