Donald Trump was in Colorado on Friday and he’s sending his caddie, Mike Pence, to campaign there next week. He must think he has a chance in the Centennial State, but things don’t look too positive in that regard. The Real Clear Politics polling average gives Clinton an eight point advantage, every recent poll shows a clear lead for her, and the most recent polls (Fox– Clinton +10, Monmouth– Clinton +13) are the worst ones in the bunch.
Most troublesome for Trump, he’s lagging behind Clinton with white voters. For example, the latest NBC-Wall Street Journal-Marist poll found Trump trailing Clinton by 19 points with college-educated whites. That’s too big of a deficit to overcome with his 11-point lead with whites who have no college degrees. There isn’t one chance in hell that Trump will will any racial group other than whites, so if nothing changes this is checkmate.
Thus:
In a sign of confidence, Clinton is ratcheting down her investments on the air here: Earlier this week, her campaign ended a statewide television buy that began in mid-June.
With nine Electoral College votes, Colorado is a medium sized prize [bigger than Oregon and Connecticut (7) and smaller than Missouri (10) and Arizona (11)]. It’s not likely to be a key state, as most plausible scenarios don’t have it serving as a tipping-point. I can come up with at least one scenario, though, where Colorado would be decisive. If Trump were to win every Romney state and also win Florida, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Iowa then Colorado would give him a very narrow 272-266 victory. Of course, in that scenario, Virginia could serve the same purpose.
On the whole, though, Clinton probably is happy to have Trump and Pence stumping out in the Rockies instead of in states where they stand a better chance and where the results are more likely to matter.
Hoo-boy.
Watch the MSM totally ignore this.
Unless the National Enquirer decides to pick it up and run with it; then it might get some wider play, given their track record for bagging politicans with salacious stories.
The National Enquirer is in the tank for Trump. It endorsed him for one thing, and gleefully printed the bogus story about Rafael Cruz being buddies with Lee Harvey Oswald. Publisher David Pecker (really!) is asshole buddies with Trump.
The Enquirer won’t write shit, unless it’s to smear the alleged victim.
Ah, I wasn’t aware of that.
Never mind.
Well it was published on 6/29 and I have not seen it anywhere else – so you are right, it has been ignored.
I think that works against both candidates – Trump for obvious reasons, but it also makes the old stories about Bill fair game per media rules
And the pub date is 6/29/2016. A month old. In a sea of brainless crap being poured on us by the Donald, this has no legs.
If you want an accusation which might have a chance to damage this dreadful person, here is a good one:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2016/07/28/trump-kids-named-but-not-charged-in-250-mill
ion-tax-evasion-case/#b5877be2fa02
Why do people write things without checking. Drive me nuts.
By the way – I know LCV is sending field staff to CO, so I doubt the story.
But good Chist, if someone is going to say if a state is key, couldn’t they at least both to check the fucking data.
Here is an exercise. Make a list of states by margin. Then go from largest margin to smallest. Then keep a running tally of the EV as you go down the list.
This allows you to spot the tipping point. The state that turned the election.
If you do that for 2012 the tipping point state is:
Colorado. By the way, the same was true in 2008
Here are the 10 closest states, and the running tally of EV’s
Before you get to the 10 closest, the EV total is Obama 217 Romney 191
Wisconsin: O +6.7, Obama 227
Nevada: O +6.6 Obama 233
NH: O +5.8 Obama 237
IA O +56, Obama 243
PA O+5, Obama 263
CO O+4.7, Obama 271
The list of the 10 closest:
https:/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2012/11/08/the-10-closest-states-in-election-2012
The rest are
VA +3
NC -2.2
OH 1.9
Fl .7
Doing this by the reveals that the EC gives the Dems a +.8 advantage. By that I mean if the margins hold relative to the national margin, a Republican would need to win the national vote by .8% to flip Colorado and win the EC.
That would put a different spin on things: Trump’s in CO because it’s the likely tipping point – but he has almost zero chance of tipping it.
I glanced at the 538 today, and it does look grim for Trump. He’s doing extremely well, winning 2 of the traditional 3 (OH/PA/FL) and flipping a couple of states like NV – and he still loses (by a hair).
That requires collecting and analyzing a lot of data and making some reasonable assumptions about the electorate this time around. Far quicker and easier to pull out an opinion and pass it off as fact.
Got it in one, Marie.
I am totally amazed by the intense analysis of obscure, arcane motives for campaigning in CO.
Occam’s razor, azzholes: the simplest explanation that account for all known facts is most likely the answer.
Trump is politically STUPID.
I thought it was b/c he is looking for property for a golf course
Once again you’ve completely (willfully?) misread my comment. I’m seen no evidence that you or anyone else here other than fladem bothers to collect and analyze any hard data. That alone is almost never sufficient, but it’s often an important piece of puzzles. As is reading a wide range of material.
Trump operates his campaign not too differently from most of the comments here. Going with what he knows, or thinks he knows, and doesn’t stop to check any facts, history, blah, blah, blah. And he too likes to bully those he views as his competitors. Does it give you a thrill trolling my comments looking for some easy attack line? heh — might disappoint you to know that I ignore yours except when they are in direct response to one of my comments and feel forced to answer it, although I’d prefer not to.
ummmmmmm…Marie? I was agreeing with you.
I think Defarm was being sarcastic – ie agreeing with you.
I guarantee the Clintons are all over that list.
Realclearpolitics had a panel with 4 pollsters, one of whom was a Clinton pollster. Virginia and Colorado mean Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania can all be lost.
Taken together those two states are Clinton’s firewall.
That came directly from a Clinton pollster.
So as I said this story is bullshit.
I think Booman wants to write about theme. Remember the Loras poll of Iowa, which everybody saw immediately was crap?
Doubtless, the Clinton campaign is also happy to see that the Trump campaign is taking the weekend off on the campaign trail.
Donald will be on one of tomorrow’s talk shows, and other surrogates will be on others, but Clinton’s campaign events allow the campaign to get contact info and make plans to work with volunteers in the event regions, and provide an extra opportunity to set up meetings with campaign staff recruits.
Trump doesn’t believe in persuasion conversations and GOTV operations. I’m glad.
He appears to think he can win with rallies and tweets.
Because he’s a functional moron running amuck – politically speaking.
SWSATSQ
This is all simply more leftiness self-back patting, Booman, and you should damned well know it by now.
People have been treating Trump this way right from the get-go, and the only result has been him defying the so-called “odds” every goddamned step of the way.
I am by no means a Hillary supporter, but neither am I a Trump supporter, and I think the odds are that a Trump presidency would prove to be even more catastrophic than an HRC presidency. If this onanistic “We’ve got it WON!!!” self-abuse continues, around about three weeks before Election Day there’s gonna to be whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on in the Dem camps as they realize that they’ve been had.
By themselves!!!
WTFU!!!
This guy is a teflon-coated bomb!!!
AG
Except those that appreciated that Trump was running in GOP primaries and his competition ranged from non-started to the scary Canadian didn’t have much trouble projecting that Trump had a good shot at winning. Assuming he didn’t self-immolate or self-destruct. Where many blew it was in declaring that X was surely a sign that Trump was now (finally?) beginning to self-destruct or that candidate Y had eaten his Wheaties and ready to be the Trump-slayer. The latter were delusional, but they’d never really allowed for a Trump win anyway. The former failed to grasp exactly why Trump was generically attractive to Republican voters and what made him more specifically attractive to them in 2016 as either their first, second, or third choice.
And now it’s candidate Z (HRC) that has eaten her Wheaties and is ready to be the Trump-slayer.
How’s that worked out so far?
AG
We’ll know in the next month or so. All I can say at this point is that whatever natural advantage the GOP (institutionally and after eight years with a Democrat in the WH) had going into this election cycle has been squandered with Trump as the nominee. After a not inspiring primary season in ’88, Dukakis didn’t lose that natural advantage until after the convention.
But has it been squandered? That certainly is the high cry of the mass media throughout the entire spectrum of supposed left-center-right media.
But…I repeat…this meme has been repeated for over 13 months in different forms at much the same intensity. So far, that meme has been totally wrong.
As Obama said after he was first elected:
“I won.” His implication? “Get used to it.”
As you say…in a month or so we’ll know more.
AG
I’m not pushing any meme. In 2000 Democrats bent themselves into pretzels to rationalize why an idiot like GWB had been leading throughout the campaign. One factor in that lead was the natural advantage a GOP candidate had going into the election. The others were more specific to that election and the individuals that factored into the assessment. What I’m calling a “natural advantage” is seen earlier rather than later in the general election. It’s sort of like that natural advantage that an incumbent running for re-election tends to enjoy.
Some of that was seen earlier in the primary polling numbers for Rubio and Kaisich v. Clinton. It hasn’t been seen at all in Trump v. Clinton. I’m not saying that Rubio or Kaisich could have held onto that advantage, neither were strong candidates, but it was there.
As the guy who jumped from the top of the Empire state building said to the questioner on the 22nd Floor:
“OK, so far”
Well, as I think Fladem above noted, of course he has to campaign in Colorado, at least if he wants to win.
Look, we know Trump enough to doubt that there is any real strategy there. However, if there were a strategy at play campaigning in Colorado – and starting his first major event post-DNC in Colorado Springs – would be a pretty good start. Yes, he’s behind in a lot of states – too many states. In order to win he’s going to have to turn the tide in a lot of them. He could choose to target the minimum needed to get 270 and ignore the rest, or he could choose to include several “insurance” states in his campaign list as well just in case on of his must-have states doesn’t work out. At this point the latter strategy makes the most sense, at least through August at which point the polls will have hardened somewhat. So Colorado is still close enough to be swing – go for it.
But I think a bigger part of why this was his first stop is that the Springs area – home to a very wingnut population that is tailor made for Trump – full of whites of the fundamentalist and military variety (mostly enlisted, although there is a big officer class too), and generally lower levels of education. In addition, the very large number of fundamentalist organizations, led by the godfather of them all Focus on the Family, means that political events that happen here can have a lot of influence on those same voters in other states.
So far, so good, in terms of rationale. The problem is with the execution. The guy gives an interview with the Colorado Springs Gazette, whose editorial board is so extreme as to be to the right of the WSJ, and yet their reaction is luke warm, and they put out a concurrent editorial that Clinton helped her chances with the DNC. He clearly isn’t in tune with a number of the issues they care about.
Then he goes to the rally. OMFG. His campaign staff – probably on a tight budget – avoids the larger venues and picks a smallish hall on the UC-Colorado Springs campus. 1500 capacity, with a spillover hall where they can put another 1000. These numbers are – as always – included in the standard facility rental contract. Then they send out over 10,000 tickets to local Trump supporters. Bad enough to send home 3/4 of the people you invited, but worse, when Trump gets on stage he berates the local fire marshal for enforcing the occupancy limit and suggests that he’s really a Clinton fan. Ok, normally your typical wingnut will go with the flow and do the two minute hate at the designated lazy government employee. But, local context is a little different. Anyone involved in fire prevention or fire fighting is revered after two major wildfires in the county in 2012 and 2013. On top of that, this guy received a Civilian of the Year award locally for his work last year during the two mass shooting in town.
If you don’t read the Gazette regularly as I do you won’t get it – but the tone of the political news today is unusually subdued regarding Trump. This was their first taste of their candidate in person and a lot of them are aghast.
Also, keep in mind that at the local and state-wide caucuses in Colorado the GOP resoundingly picked Cruz. Don’t misunderstand – Trump has a lot of big fans here as he does everywhere. But as a whole the local GOP is not at all thrilled.
I therefore can’t see Trump coming close in Colorado – although I understand why his campaign knows they have to try. In recent years the polls have understated the support for the Democrat because they undercount the Latinos – this year there are more Latinos and they’ll vote against Trump in even greater numbers than they did Romney (and back in 2012 I relayed how so many Latinos at the precinct where I was a poll watcher were adamant that they had to vote against the GOP). In addition to the above there isn’t much reason for GOP Coloradoans to go to the polls in November. There is a cool universal health care initiative on the ballot, but it doesn’t have a chance. Most of the House seats aren’t competitive and the Senate seat won’t be either. The GOP base has a minority of voters who will support any black GOP candidate, no matter how obviously insane or stupid, because it allows them to say “see – I’m not racist”. (The fact that they lower their bar so much for a black Republican is, in fact, an excellent indicator of their racism.) So, like with Herman Cain and Ben Carson, a minority of GOP voters picked Darryl Glenn for Senate. Ironically he’s from the same county as Colorado Springs – in fact he’s my own county commissioner. And he’s a flaming idiot. On board appeals he’s made numerous decisions going against what local emergency or law enforcement people want, going against local codes, and against the large majority of neighbors. Such as allowing a residentially-zoned house to raise livestock (fortunately for the neighbors, the state stepped in and forced that house to get rid of the hybrid wolves they were raising). His campaign is off to the kind of start you’d expect, and Democratic incumbent Michael Bennett figures to be able to save a lot of his campaign warchest for future years.
Trump also attacked retired Gen. John Allen, who spoke at the DNC in support of Hillary. Granted, he’s a Marine and Colorado is heavily Air Force; still, it’s a civilian attacking someone who’s served. Do you have a feel for how that will play in Colorado?
Unfortunately General Allen violated the 12th commandment of wingnuthood – he endorsed a Democrat. Once you do that you’re excommunicated from the military reverence order. No, his trashing a General who endorse a Democrat won’t bother his GOP voters.
Here’s what we’re up against. 2006 was a rare pro-Democratic wave mid-term election. House district 5 covers Colorado Springs and environs. The incumbent GOPer was retiring and there was a 6-or-7 way fight for his seat in the primary – which made sense, win the seat and you are set for life as you’ll never lose an election after that. The winner of the primary was Doug Lamborn with something like only 18% of the vote. The fact is, he was despised by his own party in a way few politicians are – although nowhere near the level of Ted Cruz. If ever there was a chance for a Democrat to win this seat, it would be 2006.
The Democrats ran Jay Fawcett. I mean, many years we run no one, so he wasn’t challenged. Fawcett was the perfect candidate locally. AFA grad, military honors out the wazoo, and endorsed by a large number of local business leaders.
Dug Lamebrain won in a landslide 60-40. The same result as for most races in the county in elections before and since. Basically, the GOP voters didn’t even consider the Democrat because he was the Democrat. Period. And this was before Obama, the Tea Party, Obamacare, ISIS, etc.
It’s also very heavily Army. Fort Carson is home to nine divisions, with a lot of soldiers deploying to Afghanistan and Iraq.
And irrespective of branch of service, folks down there are not fond of criticism of generals. Especially from non-serving chickenhawks with their heads up their asses.
Colorado in general is not friendly terrain for Trump. If he wants to waste his time here, great. I see no way he will carry this state. It gets bluer by the day.
Well, two very different answers! Thanks, guys. I guess come November we’ll find out which of you was right, eh?
Oh, I think we aren’t that far apart. First, we both think Trump loses Colorado without any doubt. Second, while I agree that the military folks don’t take kindly to criticism of a military leader in general, in political situations their party preference will trump (get it?) any such concerns.
Hmmmmmmm………… will party preference overcome Trump’s pissing on a Gold Star mother whose son died saving his fellow soldiers? He’s already attacked the father, and now the mother has responded with that powerful Washington Post essay; can he possibly restrain himself from striking back at her?
I think attacking the parents is much more likely to get some backlash going amongst his supporters than attacking the brass.
At some point the cumulative effect of attacking random people (as opposed to other politicians and public figures) will have to weigh on a lot of people.
Even so, if the election is close expect the Trumpites to still rationalize voting for him. But if it starts to look like a landslide, look for his supporters to start bailing out on the order of millions of votes.
I would give you six 4’s If I could.
Good job!
.
Addenda:
As noted below – Colorado is really a critical state.
I know for a fact they are sending field staff there. I know from the mouth of a Clinton pollster that CO+VA are the Clinton firewall.
If Clinton carries CO and VA and the following states are tossups: NV, NH, Iowa, FL, PA and OH, Clinton has 8 ways to win and Trump only has 2.
So trust me: Clinton is going to be all over Colorado.
Re: Point 2: CNN has a story up about that, which isn’t blatantly “Trump, you dickish idiot” about it but I think subtly gets the point across.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/31/politics/trump-elevator-rescue/index.html
The media can kneecap a candidate without being obvious, and I’m wondering whether we’ll be seeing more of this sort of thing. Something to keep an eye out for, acknowledging of course that we’re far more tuned into politics than the average voter, which can distort our perceptions.
I don’t know.
Things seem a little too close. I see a story about Clinton jumping ahead by fifteen points from her convention bounce. Then I flip over to Real Clear Politics or 538 and it’s either very close or Trump is winning.
Could someone with a better understanding of these polls tell me how Trump be favored to win 269.8 electoral votes?
I am of a mind to think that polls at this point in the cycle don’t really mean anything much.
If Clinton was losing or was close in Oregon, I might risk nuclear war to vote for her. But I don’t think Trump will get anything on the Coast. So I look at those electoral maps and see a lot of red between Nevada and New Hampshire. That’s disturbing.
And there you have it. Trump did get a bounce from his convention, which indicate it’s possible he’ll win, but even so the current polls favor him far too much. Polls coming out next week will favor Clinton far too much. In two weeks, the bounces will have settled out and you can look without wasting your time.
The +15 is from a poll with a decided bias towards Clinton. It’s best to read it as a +10 bounce from their result last week – which would be a very good bounce, but it’s only one poll, and bounces usually don’t last.
If other polls show similar bounces, Clinton will be ahead in the poll averages by +10 next week. But, of course, it will mean next to nothing.
Individual polls are snapshots of the political leanings and the current popularity of the candidates. Watch the trendlines because that reveals more than one poll or another. These polls are necessarily popular vote numbers and not EC. Two reasons: Popularity is a factor in developing momentum. Far more extensive (and expensive) polling would have to be done to put the numbers into the context of EC votes and absent a wave not so many are likely to flip from where they’ve been. And if such a wave were emerging, that will be seen in the poll numbers.
If one starts from the position that “leanings” are 50/50 (which has been true since 1992), it’s interesting to see how little that candidates have been able to move that needle in each of the election cycles.
If HRC were half as formidable as her supporters claim she is, she would have been consistently leading the ridiculous Trump by about ten points. The difficulty this time is that while attention to the election has been higher than usual throughout the cycle, the two nominees have much higher than average unfavorable ratings. A single (and credible) “someone else” would likely win against these two. That will begin to shake out in the next six to eight weeks as people accept that there will be no “someone else.”
The red areas are where a hard-fought downticket campaign can bring returns in an end-of-campaign collapse. The magic number is 180,000 voters per Congressional District. Find the candidate in the district who can pull that running on a seriously progressive platform, and national candidate collapse on the R side could deliver the district.
It’s probabilities are in the realm of hedges, but it is doable. And it puts pressure on the other campaign to shore up “safe” districts.
Any poll taken between July 15 and July 27 is garbage.
What matters is post convention. There have been two polls out: Raba which went from 12 to 5 to 15. PPP which went from 4 to 5.
So the Conventions mostly cancelled themselves out, though Clinton might have netted some ground.
Before the conventions this was 4 point race. My guess is it goes to 6.
Do campaign rallies even matter? Are they really affecting the local voters or does the national coverage of each event make the location irrelevant? Booman is thinking like someone stuck in the 1950s.
Only crazy people go to the rallies. The rest of us stay home and watch them on cnn, msnbc, or, God forbid, Fox News. Mostly we simply ignore them completely.
Travel in the Internet age is irrelevant… So are tv ads. Try to keep up.
Matters as to what TV news chooses to air. Had TV coverage been unbiased, Sanders early and large rallies would have been covered. As it was they ignored them far longer than even a somewhat biased media would have done. Yet, at a certain point, they couldn’t not cover them at all.
Matters as to the current enthusiasm level for the nominees. That does filter into voter motivation in November, particularly for younger voters.
Rallies and appearances that feature a surrogate and not the candidate are more likely to capture when a candidate is in trouble than when she/he is doing well. For example, one didn’t need the polls in NH and WV to know that HRC was in trouble. Bill and Chelsea were drawing tiny audiences and they often put their foot in their mouth at such appearances.
The communication channel depends on your intended audience.
Presidential candidates coming to a small town and doing retail politics has great turnout in towns that are rarely visited and suck in the local media. A skillful social media team could also play some of the face-to-face interaction for internet interest if the candidate is equally skillful in showing that they listen instead of spewing talking points. Good and authentic interactions can also ripple through the personal networks of the people who met the Presidential candidate. It is converting those networks into volunteers that allows you to expand the map and intensify the GOTV activities.
If it works well, those earlier phases draw huge rallies in the nearest cities during the last three weeks of the campaign; those are also TV and internet events, sometimes covered by local media, certainly live streamed, and if you are lucky covered by national media. Most importantly, in early voting states, they can be followed up with subsidiary rallies at voting stations (outside the prohibited electioneering area) and people can bank votes right there. The success in North Carolina that Obama had doing this caused the Republican legislature to try to limit early voting and Republican candidates to have church revivals and take voters to the polls in church buses.
The technology is not just the internet or social media, it is integrated media and on-the-ground tactics to get motivated voters celebrating going to the polls and supporting the candidate.
The purpose of GOTV after all is to unblock every reason that voters have for not actually going to the polls even after they have decided to vote for the candidate and the down-ticket candidates.
That is where organizing has its place; it is what captures the resources and integrates the activities in a way to maximize the number of candidate votes over the geography. And why non-candidate local rallies and marching to vote (even with a movemental or protest style) can be so effective in electing challengers.
The secret of the red state/blue state labeling was creating an imaginal friction that challengers would have to overcome. In effect all districts are swingy; some rarely swing over 60% for the challenging candidate. There is a lot of social peer pressure behind that, not to mention actual party organization. Tis why most local folks think that change only comes after the Lord calls a few strategic people home. It takes a little field experience and spider sense to know which local communities are persuadable and which are rock-hard stuck in their ways. And often there is some local secret that has a community stuck in its ways. One I remember from some organizing in the 1970s was a community in which the sheriff himself was running cocaine. Everybody knew and everybody would not talk to strangers. The sheriff finally made a misstep and the state police took him down.
Getting out the vote is not just a matter of media advertising or media-covered events, it is a widening call to personal participation in action as volunteers who can actually (because they are local) unblock their friends’, neighbors’, co-workers’, and family members’ blocks to voting for your candidate.
But this is where the conservative Wurlitzer has been so invidious. Shows like Rush Limbaugh and networks like Fox News have propagandized their viewers not to pay attention to those personal networks and have legitimized only them. The political genius who figures out how to break through this cult wall will quite literally save the United States of America. And that will take serious post-cult intervention. A stunning defeat of Donald Trump would be a first step to that disentrhrallment.
I want good people so pissed off at Trump that even Cimmmaron County OK (90% Romney) turns blue. I think Hillary Clinton herself should motivate the 100 Democrats there who went into that voting booth and voted their conscience in 2012. A commercial about the most Republican counties in America and what the GOP has done to help them run in the last week of the campaign might humanize these deep red counties and possibly flip them. They are the counties that likely get taken for granted by their GOP candidates and state parties.
Expanding the map means actually listening to the situations and stories of the geography and reframing them in a progressive frame,while allow for notions of personal responsibility and dignity and religiosity to co-exist in that frame.
Given Trump’s predictable unpredictability:
OMG. Trump holding a gun — any gun — would look 10 times as dumb as Dukakis in a Snoopy helmet.
Not so sure about that. When Trump claimed not to leave home without his gun, his poll numbers weren’t hurt and may have gone up.
How this sort of stuff gets evaluated by regular folks is how well it fits with the person’s existing public persona and the degree to which the stunt can be see as obvious pandering. Kerry in camos on a duck hunt — oh dear. The photos of Kerry windsurfing did no damage. Maybe in his personal life Kerry often goes duck hunting and wears camo and windsurfed but that one time. However, candidates for POTUS need to be careful about photo-ops during a campaign.
Booman asks:
Shortish answer to a fairly stupid question?
Duh.
Or possibly…but not really likely…
Duh!!!
Either way…or any possible combination of those two possibilities…
DUH!!!
Later…
AG
OT: Things are getting spicy at Incirilik Air Base. Lots of nukes to lose there.
https:/www.rt.com/news/354042-turkish-police-incirlik-nato-coup
Did you read any of the comments after the article? There are lot of unhinged people in the world. Scary.
State polls right now are sparse and wonky, but here are Sam Wang’s “power of your vote” states (analogous to tipping point states), in rank order:
Oregon
Ohio
Nevada
Michigan
North Carolina
New Hampshire
Virginia
Maine
Iowa
Wisconsin
New Mexico
Colorado
— Colorado’s ahead of Florida (where the two are tied), indicating that, according to current polling, there are plenty of scenarios where Trump wins Florida and loses the election. In this case, the conventional wisdom might be right for once: Trump needs to win the major rust belt states, improbably as it may be, to win the election. He also needs to reverse Clinton’s leads in North Carolina and Virginia.