I don’t have a whole lot of patience for national polling of presidential campaigns. The media go through a quadrennial exercise in feigning ignorance about how the Electoral College works. Today, my go-to website for state-by-state polls began their daily tracking. It is very good news for us, but with a few notes of caution. Clinton leads Trump 312-197, but I would make the following observations based on today’s map.
- I suspect we can make NH solidly ours (and pick up the Senate seat)
- We need to firm up MI and PA, but they have been reliably blue in recent presidential cycles and I have a hard time imagining this being the year they flip.
- We should be able to bring FL into our column on the Hispanic vote (unless there is still resentment about opening Cuba).
- We could flip IA and possibly AZ.
- A win is a win, but it’s gratifying to see TX, UT, and MS lighter shades of red.
- Kaine should be able to make VA more solidly blue.
- A few of the states don’t add up to 100% by several points.
This website will update almost every day until the November election.
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These 2 sites paint a far less rosy picture than the one you cited:
–Nate Silver’s 538
–NYTimes
I’m not sure what to believe anymore, other than that we are off to a bad start to the Convention with the DNC email clusterf*ck!
…but how do they account for states like Maine that apportion EC votes? Their algorithm APPEARS to treat them as winner-take-all. That said, it is far better than the national poll model.
I’ve been waiting for that to go on PredictIt. They voted for LePage twice and for a tea party Congressmen last time around and its all white people laid off from paper mills, seems to be his demo. There are a lot of interesting electoral tie scenarios that can be created if one agrees with this assumption. It did look like Bush was going to do well there to the point that I campaigned for Kerry up there in 2004, and it ended up all going blue. So who knows. It’s a lot harder to get to 269-269 without it, though not impossible. Veep has predicted it and maybe that can be the West Wing did it of this decade.
I actually appreciate Christopher linking back to this site, I hadn’t check it in awhile and it was my go to prior to the original 538. I’ll also refer everyone to make their own maps for 270towin. That should be a fun contest further down the road.
One of the things that irritates me to no end is this premise (mostly in Democratic wonk circles; their Republican colleagues are usually smarter) that they can model elections and avoid doing competent work on the ground. In particular folks who think that they can micro-target their way to Heaven (while being illiterate about little nuances on the ground) are on my perpetual shit list.
Well we now see what happens when people memorize the map and ignore the road.
But there is hope.
One of the bigger ironies of this race is that many Sanders supporters have a great deal of credibility in many pro-Trump geographies in Appalachia and the industrial Midwest. Equally important is the fact that (unlike many Clinton operatives) they live in these areas.
If things don’t get to far out-of-whack in Philadelphia, and enough on-the-ground Sanders supporters are enlisted to stop Trump (and not micromanaged by the Clinton campaign), it’s not out of the realm of possibility that virtue can triumph over evil.
Thank God that Bernie is a class act.
is directly proportional the informed, principled reading of them. The media is rarely informed or concerned with the meaning of polls, just the reporting. Nate Silver and Sam Wang have pretty much nailed down the methodology for accuracy. They continue to refine their work. No poll, however, completely accurate, and no forecast is 100%.