Among political prognosticators, there have been two main camps in this election. One camp argued that the country has become rigidly polarized to a point where any Republican or Democratic nominee starts out with 40% support and the battle is only over the 20% of voters who don’t align with either side. The other camp, represented by me, argued that there was nothing permanent about our relatively stable red/blue state split and that we’re reaching an inflection point where one side or the other would decisively “win the argument.”
I’ve often pointed out that Ronald Reagan beat Walter Mondale in Massachusetts and Rhode Island and Vermont, and that it was possible for a Democrat to win in states like Arizona and Georgia and South Carolina. For more than two years, I’ve been identifying signs that this could well be a landslide election, and I predicted that it wouldn’t be a close election with even more confidence than I predicted that the Democrats would win.
As Nancy pointed out, the polls are now pointing in the direction of a Reagan-sized blowout. Among the signs to look for are evidence that red states are going to fall into Clinton’s arms, that Trump is cratering below the 40% floor, and that Clinton is polling above 50% in the four-way race with a healthy number of undecideds still out there.
Today we can see all three things.
There’s a Arizona Republic/Morrison/Cronkite News poll showing Clinton with a six point lead in the Grand Canyon State. There are (admittedly dubious) SurveyMonkey polls showing Clinton in the lead in Georgia and only two points down in Texas. That Texas number is supported by a University of Houston poll and a SurveyUSA poll showing Trump leading in the Lone Star State by three and four points, respectively. There are two recent polls of Alaska showing Trump leading within the margin of error. And, of course, it seems like everyone is talking about Utah, where Trump is still favored but could conceivably come in third place.
A non-partisan PRRI poll out this morning shows Clinton with a 51%-36% lead among likely voters (up from a 43%-43% tie in September). A Bloomberg poll shows Clinton with 47%-38% lead in the four-way race. As for swing states, Nate Silver currently has Clinton winning in Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Iowa, and Nevada, all of which have been in Trump’s column in the recent past. Silver’s current Electoral College forecast has Clinton winning 347-191, but that’s without giving Clinton Georgia, Utah or Alaska.
The race has also narrowed in states like Indiana, Missouri, and (perhaps) Montana. The last poll out of South Carolina, which was conducted between September 18th and 26th (before all the sexual assault allegations against Trump) showed him leading there by only four points.
It’s clear which candidate has the momentum. It’s also clear that Trump is responding badly by acting in a very erratic way. The gender gap is exploding to unprecedented levels. Trump’s lead in the Census Bureau-defined South has shrunk to 1.2% (Romney won it 7.1%).
In the primaries, Trump consistently performed poorly with late-deciding voters.
Voters on the fence have not been supporting Trump. Among the three in 10 Nevada GOP voters who made up their minds in the final week, Rubio won four in 10 of them, compared to about a quarter for Trump and Cruz each. Cruz has also seen more success than Trump with late-deciders, though slightly less than Rubio.
Similar patterns appear in other early voting states, with Trump winning just 14 percent of late-deciders in Iowa and 17 percent of late-deciders in South Carolina – both behind Rubio and Cruz in states where almost half of voters made final decisions in that time period.
That seems to be repeating itself now, and with a large pool of undecided voters and voters who are flirting with third party candidates, a late tilt in Clinton’s favor rather than a roughly even split would move the popular vote margin even higher and put some of these close-polling red states in serious jeopardy.
As of now, Clinton seems stalled at about 51% (roughly Obama’s total four years ago) and Trump seems to have a floor in the high-thirties (about seven points below where McCain finished eight years ago). If Clinton wins the battle for late-deciders, her totals will rise into the low or even mid-fifties. It doesn’t seem possible that she can match Reagan’s 59% total in 1984 or Nixon’s 61% total in 1972, but exceeding the 53% that Poppy Bush got in 1988 and Obama received in 2008 definitely looks within her reach.
Tonight’s debate may play a roll in the final margins, as a poor performance by Trump could result in an accelerated collapse, while a surprisingly strong win for him might stop or even reverse his bleeding.
For now, though, it looks like I was right. This is not going to be another red state/blue state election. Trump has lost the argument.
If todays polls were readings on the Stock Exchange, they’d shut it down until they could “figure what the hell is going on.”
With that said, I’m already groining about the to be published articles in December about how Trump supporters have their feelings hurt by gloating progressives and democrats.
“groining”?
Is that a typo?
I kind of like it.
“In Your Heart You Know He’s White”
That’s brilliant….and then there’s that line from Goldwater’s convention speech: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”
I sure hope you’re right, Booman.
Is that what he was making — an argument? 🙂
I love BooMan’s semantics about “the argument” — I think it’s kind of brilliantly succinct. It reminds me of the best of Perlstein’s work: the distillation of the political process to a kind of “moneyball” formula that absorbs and eclipses all the other metrics.
“As of now, Clinton seems stalled at about 51%…”
Discounting any poll prior to 9/15 (it IS late in the season), unless you see polls that I don’t (which is admittedly possible) the first poll to show HRC above 49% was CNN on 10/3. Since then, there have been at least 2 polls showing her at 53% (here and Pew Research on 10/14). Somehow a delay of 13 days with a two highs of 53% seems hardly to rate the adjective “stalled”.
Alternatively, if you are considering the set of polls with 4 candidates (5 if you count other), then the first 50% I can find is Monmouth on 10/17. What am I missing?
As far as survey monkey goes, I think in another 3 or 4 years it will probably be a good poll … but then so will the aberration known as the LAT/USC. Right now I don’t trust outlier results like this.
Since Johnson and Stein are going to be on most ballots (indeed, MN ballots have 8) you can’t discount to top 2.
“As of now, Clinton seems stalled at about 51%…”
Who knew there were that many neo-liberals out there?
If it had been any other republican the numbers wouldn’t look like this. Then again, the GOP base rejected any other Republican. If Trump hadn’t entered who would have won, what would the primaries have lookd like?
If the pilgrims had shot a skunk instead of a turkey, Thanksgiving would be a completely different holiday.
.
I don’t think they actually shot a turkey, but may be wrong.
Anyhow it might be quite different! As an avid reader and occasional writer of alternate history it sounds like it might be a great counter-factual.
In Yiddish: As di bubbe volt gehat beytsim volt zi gevain mayn zaidah.
English translation: If my grandmother had balls she would be my grandfather.
And in Malahide as a girl my gran used to hear ‘If my gran had wheels, she’d be the Dublin tram’.
Is that because everyone in town rode her? 🙂
“won the argument” What one was that? Most fit to be president? Yes, that she won.
But this was NOT a nationalized election on competing visions. Was no vision, period. Republicans lost theirs–no new ideas. And Dems are hanging on to status quo, if they are so lucky.
And Hillary did not nationalize it, either. She is still inviting Republicans to cross over–so they are legit to her.
Please see my comment above. BooMan uses “the argument” in a very specific way (I think he links one of his previous posts about it, here) — it’s extremely lucid and applicable.
Oh, Jesus, mino — OF COURSE she made an appeal to Republicans. Politicians get elected by voters, and she’s thinking about down ballot races.
Are you saying GOP voters aren’t “legit?”
If Trump was only alienating women, he’d lose badly. But there’s late breaking evidence that even men are now breaking toward Clinton. My guess is his recent claims of voter fraud play really badly outside the bubble of his dead-end support. It smacks of bad sportsmanship, which offends men in particular, and heightens already hard-to-ignore concerns around his stability and fitness for office; themes that Clinton has been riffing on for months.
If men are now peeling away in significant numbers, we will have a landslide. I’m curious to see whether Trump will be stuffed back into the box tonight and try to come across as thoughtful albeit critical of Clinton or if he’s going to continue to go full-Breitbart. It’s clear from watching Conway attempt to spin the unspinnable which side she’s on. I assume Herr Breitbart is on the other. Hopefully Trump will continue to consider himself unshackled.
any side in particular, currently.
I don’t understand the question.
Oh, sorry — now I see it wasn’t a question. Hadn’t seen your subject line.
Andrew Breitbart is still dead.
Well, two states beyond 2012 (NC+Arizona) does not really get us beyond the red/blue divide, especially if Iowa goes the other way. But it will win you ten bucks off of me, and that’s the important thing!
It’s winner take all, devil take the hindmost tonight. Stay cool Hillary and let the Orange Man boil.
I’ve been puzzled by the bimodal curve in Nate Silver’s model for a while. Well, the interesting thing I’ve noticed this week is that the distribution is oscillating between bimodal and a single mode across several additions of polls. My current hypothesis is that it might be a kind of house error of the sort that disappears the closer to the election one gets. What also is happening is the distribution appears to becoming unskewed in that the long tail on the Trump side is shortening and fattening and the tails look similar. I think that is also a consequence of house errors converging.
If my hypothesis is true the best-case end result would be the convergence of the mean and the mode, which means that the current mode of around 360 electoral votes becomes the expected value (around a 30 electoral vote increase from the current expected value).
In the Senate races, the absolute upside in my intuition is 62 Democratic Senators. That means running the table, bumping off Grassley, and picking up Alaska. My intution is that Democrats will win but fall short of the magical 60; the leadership better have their strategy for ending the filibuster ready because McConnell is likely to continue to stonewall if there is either Republican control of the House or Democratic division in their House caucus.
There is a lot of phone calling going on. I hope people are doing traditional canvassing and focusing on removing transportation, child care, and job issues.
Early voting here starts tomorrow in NC. The progressive advocates here have already gotten out their sample ballots. Don’t know how Democrats are doing in the rest of the state.
The firebombing of the GOP office in Orange County (the deepest blue one) seems at the moment to be most likely a Trump sympathizer opposed to local establishment GOP party officials although there have been other rumors. Or just a pre-Halloween prank.
What do you make of the credibility of this analysis of early voting in your State, TarheelDem?
http://www.insight-us.org/blog/ncs-2016-early-voting-turnout-through-17-october/
It makes me happy, but I wanted to see if you concur. Are we about to see a Senator Ross?
Pollster still has Clinton +8 (the PRRI poll is not yet counted) and there seems to be a pretty big variance around that number (between 3 and 4% it appears).
The state polling is fairly consistent with that, Texas excepted. I don’t know if there’s enough polling there to draw any firm conclusions, however.