With all the talk of Trump getting trounced in the polls, you wouldn’t think there are states in which he’s outperforming Romney and McCain.
But you’d be wrong, at least according a new Washington Post state-by-state presidential poll, one of the most comprehensive polls I’ve ever seen, with more than 75,000 voters surveyed. In Iowa, North Dakota, Maine, and Wisconsin, Trump is performing quite well, compared to Romney and McCain.
Of course, there are states where Trump is doing stunningly worse than his predecessors. Texas, Arizona, and Mississippi, for example, are now toss-ups. New Mexico appears bluer than Connecticut in this election.
Rachel Maddow seemed genuinely surprised by the results in Texas and Mississippi. I didn’t hear her comment on Iowa, if she did.
But is this really hard to understand? In the national polls, the margin is hovering around 6% in Clinton’s favor, which is a solid lead compared to prior election cycles. Now, consider that black Americans, who account for over 10% of the vote, favor Clinton by at least 98 to 2. Latinos favor her by at least 3 to 1. Asians, Jews, Muslims, and Atheists are all leading D by greater margins than usual. Take those groups out and you have a landslide for Trump.
Where, then, is Trump drawing such a huge level of support? There’s only one group left – White, Christian Americans. And he’s killing it with that one demographic. More so than Romney or McCain did.
Now, look back at those states where Trump is performing horribly. Those states are loaded with minorities.
And the states where Trump is doing better than his Republican predecessors? Those states are really, really white and Christian. That’s why Iowa has gone from being a purplish blue swing state in prior elections to a pink state this time around.
Welcome to racialized America.
We have minorities on one side.
And angry, White Christians on the other.
So, with all that as background, what would the polls look like if every voter could cast a number of votes based on the collection of guns he or she owned, with each gun assigned votes according to its firepower?
This won’t end well.
This is interesting. Nate Silver’s 2016 election forecast model (right now) really looks much like the 2012 election where the final result was 332 to 206 electoral votes. PBO lost North Carolina but won Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia. Clinton is looking fairly good right now in Pennsylvania and Virginia. Her weakest states are Ohio, Florida, Nevada, Iowa and North Carolina. She can lose all of those states and end up with 273 electoral votes if she can win all of the other blue states from 2012. And she probably won’t lose all of those states, Trump just isn’t that good.
Overall, though, a truly horrible election. Where did the issues go? What are we voting for? A vote for Hillary is a vote against Trump as evidenced by her campaign ads. And a vote for Trump is a vote for the last dying gasps of white supremacy.
God help us.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/election-map-2012/president/
neo-con artists flocking to hillary as the war mongers converge as they don’t like trumps lack of war mongering. trading anti war democrats for a few disgruntled neo-con artists is a bad trade.
Nate Silver’s election forecast model is updated all day, but right now has Hillary v. Trump split at 71 to 29. Trump was back up to 32 after the Democratic convention bounce settled but he is slowly going down again for the last few days.
I’m not going to bet against Nate Silver. But looking at the states, it is clear (just as it was prior to the conventions) that the election is likely to be decided in two or three states which now appear to be Florida, Ohio, and North Carolina. The Democrats understand that if they win Florida and Ohio, they seal the deal. Period. The winner will have to win Florida’s 29 electoral votes plus one of the other two states. That is how it stands right now, and it would probably take something fairly drastic to change this.
The big unknown is voter turnout. I’m not on top of Trump’s campaign methodology, but I’ve read that he has no real ground game even in the most important battleground states. What he might learn is the ground game wins elections. Being Donald Trump only gets him so far. On election day, all those white supremacists and their sympathizers need some incentive to get off the couch and into a voting booth. Trump’s lack of political savvy, his insistence on doing it his way, may ultimately be what finishes him.
With turnout so uncertain, the realm of possibility might seem to range from Democratic landslide to a very tight race. It will be late October before we get better polling data on who really intends to vote. The only prediction I have is that black folks will turn out in droves to vote against Trump. This helps the Democrats in both Florida and Ohio.
It will definitely be interesting. What we will ultimately gain from the Trump presidential run is a head count of the number of white supremacist voters and their sympathizers. It will most assuredly be a larger number than we imagined.
http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/
Good article. Nate Silver talks about the polls right now.
SEP 8, 2016 AT 5:33 PM
Election Update: The Swing States Are Tightening, Too
By Nate Silver
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-the-swing-states-are-tightening-too/
Instead of chasing disillusioned conservatives HRC should be going after the liberal wing of the D party ….. appear with Bernie, support more progressive policies and stop hiding! Or this could go south quickly for HRC, her big corporate backers won’t care either way.
How could Hillary team up with Bernie when her goal (and that of the Democratic Party elites) has always been to crush him like a bug?
Anyhow, Bernie has already done the best he can do for her. He’s more focused now on ways to hold her feet to the fire after she’s elected, assuming that happens. And it most likely will.
Good point! Do you think many of Bernies supporters would be fooled if Hillary starting catering to them?
No, HRC can’t be trusted and most folks who are engaged in politics, current events, and/or American history understand that. I believe that many if not most people (including Bernie supporters) are just resigned to the reality that Hillary will be elected. No one knows right now what she will do as president, but some are already expecting the worst. For young Bernie supporters turned activists, I suspect it is mostly a matter of waiting her out, but also working for wrangling whatever victories they can and forcing her to acknowledge their existence.
That is probably good advice. But wouldn’t that imply that Berney supporters are easily fooled? It is sort of understood that Hillary is what she is, and she is not going going to change regardless of what she says during the campaign.
Speaking of white and black America, Colin Kaepernick’s football jersey is now the top selling football jersey in America. It was at number 20 before he began his national anthem protest.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/darrenheitner/2016/09/07/colin-kaepernick-tops-jersey-sales-in-nfl/#69f5ad1c39a1
“…republicans traditionally do better then polling suggests…”
They do? Like Romney in 2012 perhaps?
“republicans traditionally do better then polling suggests…”
They do? Like Romney in 2012 maybe?
it was republican pollsters who pulled a dewey and wrongly weigh the polls to favor romney democratic polls and non parisan polls favored obama slightly more then he got.
polls are tightening because the hold your nose and vote for hillary voters are being turned off by hillary herself her obnoxious supporters and shills in the news media. on DU an attack article on jill stein’s arrest for protesting had to be taken down when most of the comments were in support of her arrest even by those still planning to vote for hillary. the swing voters are tired of insufferable liberal elitist boors and saying why am I holding my nose to vote for this crap? trump is worse but jill stein isn’t. the voters are starting to realize the lesser of two evils is still evil.
Lol. Stein is getting what, 2 per cent? She is a vanity candidate who can’t even get elected dog catcher.
tell that to al gore. they said the same about ralph nader.
I have a suspicion, Bob, that all the polls are not really reflecting the true situation. I think that Trump “under polls” by several points because many people are too embarassed to admit they are going to vote for him when asked. Of course, I could be wrong, but I have personally witnessed two occasions where such a phenomenon occurred and I think it is more wide spread than anyone thinks.
On election day, I think there will be some very surprised people
republicans traditionally do better then polling suggests so trump should do so as well.
Captain, I was not aware of that. Given that, I suspect the margin will be even greater in the case of Trump.
You may be correct on that. It’s something called the Dinkins effect, named that based on an election in NYC where David Dinkins did worse than he was polling, presumably, the theory goes, because people polled didn’t want to say they were voting against the black candidate.