As Trump struggles, Clinton goes on offense to win over GOP
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton waves as she finishes a speech on the economy after touring Futuramic Tool & Engineering, in Warren, Mich.
WASHINGTON >> Hillary Clinton is seizing opportunities presented by a volatile presidential race to expand her base of support heading into the fall, seeking to position the Democratic Party for a sweeping victory in November.
As Donald Trump struggles through a second week of self-inflicted stumbles, the Democratic nominee’s campaign has started to push into Republican territory by courting some of the party’s core supporters and expanding her campaign’s operations into traditionally red states.
“The map favors us and, in a way, the dynamics right now favor us,” said Joel Benenson, Clinton’s senior strategist. “The more places you can make them play defense, the better off we are.”
Throughout his presidential bid, the Republican nominee has used controversy to draw attention back to his campaign. It’s a strategy that initially worried some Clinton aides, who feared he would drown out their candidate’s general-election message.
But with three months to Election Day, Clinton aides say they see more advantages than liabilities as Trump continues to say the politically unimaginable. Critics slammed Trump this week for appearing to suggest that gun-rights supporters could shoot Clinton to prevent her from appointing federal judges as president, and he drew criticism for standing by a false claim that President Barack Obama founded the Islamic State.
On Thursday, Trump said he would respond to his admitted problems in his campaign by doing “the same thing I’m doing right now.” In an interview with CNBC, he said, “At the end, it’s either going to work, or I’m going to, you know, I’m going to have a very, very nice, long vacation.”
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Democratic strategists have long argued the party could win the White House with Obama’s political coalition, the group of minority, young and female voters who twice boosted him to victory. They see the additional support Clinton is finding among independent and Republican voters as frosting on their electoral cake, potentially allowing Democrats to win back control of the Senate and enter the White House with the political momentum that comes from a sweeping victory.
“You care very deeply about the 270th electoral vote, but there are also important reasons to care about winning big,” said Geoff Garin, a pollster for Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign who now advises the pro-Clinton super PAC Priorities USA Action. “This is not just about rolling up the score.”
Clinton aides say she’s taking nothing for granted, noting the U.S. remains a deeply politically divided country. They say they remain singularly focused on the most efficient path to capturing the 270 electoral votes necessary to win the White House.
Yet Clinton is undoubtedly beginning to cast her gaze beyond the Democratic base.
“I am humbled and moved by the Republicans who are willing to stand up and say that Donald Trump doesn’t represent their values,” she said at a rally in Iowa this week. “We may not agree on everything, but this is not a normal election and I will work hard over the next three months to earn the support of anyone willing to put our country first.”
On Wednesday, following two weeks of high-profile Republican defections, her campaign launched an official effort to target GOP voters. They also took baby steps into some traditionally deep red states, telling party officials in Arizona and Georgia they plan to make a six-figure investment in field operations in the two states.
The next day, Clinton published a column in Salt Lake City’s Deseret News titled “What I have in common with Utah leaders — religious freedom and the Constitution.” While the state has not backed a Democrat for president since Lyndon Johnson in 1964, Trump himself acknowledged Thursday he is “having a tremendous problem in Utah.”
Jeremy Bird, who ran field operations for Obama’s 2012 campaign and is now consulting for Clinton’s operation, said Trump has no one to blame but himself. The unorthodox candidate hasn’t aired a single television ad since the end of the primaries and is building a bare-bones effort to get out the vote.
“His inability to put anything real on the ground in battleground states is campaign malpractice,” Bird said. “There are just so many paths to 270 and so many ways to put their presidential campaign and the Republican Party in a defensive posture, even in states that are not considered battlegrounds.”
Some recent polls suggest Clinton could also benefit from Republican-leaning voters deciding to stay home rather than come out to support Trump. Surveys in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio found that 90 percent of Democrats said they intended to support Clinton, while closer to 80 percent of Republicans intended to support Trump.
Republicans caution the race remains far from settled, especially since voters don’t particularly like either candidate. A small group of middle-class mothers interviewed by pollsters Tuesday in Columbus, Ohio, and Phoenix used words such as “painful,” ”nauseated” and “screwed” to describe their choice.
“They don’t trust Hillary Clinton,” said Republican pollster Neil Newhouse, part of the bipartisan team that conducted the focus groups. “At the same time, they can’t turn to Donald Trump because he scares them.”
Of the 20 women in the group, five said they were leaning Trump, seven to Clinton and eight undecided or backing a third party.
Only one believed Trump would actually win.
64 responses to “As Trump struggles, Clinton goes on offense to win over GOP”
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I say run up the score as much as possible and send Trump back to the WWF/Reality TV sewer he crawled out of.
AP you are full of BS. he never said for someone to shoot Hillary he said to take her out it does not mean to shoot her it means don’t vote for her and help take her out by not voting for her as president, that is what he meant so all your doing is telling lies and half truth’s, and yes Obama is a founder and Hillary is the co-founder of ISIS, we gave them guns when they were the rebel group to help take out Assad of Syria Obama had plenty chances to take them out but did not because he called them a JV team so AP and other news organization stop spewing a bunch of lies to the American people.
Trump Taxes. What is he afraid of and hiding? His crooked business dealings?
For your info, Trump files personal taxes and corporate taxes. Which do you want? Can you also ask Cankles for her and Bill’s personal taxes and the taxes for the Clinton Crime Foundation. Read where they had to resubmit 5 years of Foundation returns due to clerical error. Yeah, right – clerical error!
Keep up with the news jr., both Clinton and her running mate to release their tax returns this week.
Yes, trump is very afraid of what his tax filings will reveal.
It was clear Trump was calling for someone to assassinate a President Hillary Clinton because for her to nominate Supreme Court Justices she would already be President.
Personal taxes.
Mrs. Clinton, long ago, released more than 20 years of personal tax returns.
You need to read more.
Multiple FBI investigations are underway involving potential corruption charges against the Clinton Foundation, according to a former senior law enforcement official.
The investigation centers on New York City, where the Clinton Foundation has its main offices, according to the former official who has direct knowledge of the activities.
Prosecutorial support will come from various U.S. Attorneys Offices — a major departure from other centralized FBI investigations.
sarge22 – As usual for you, there is no evidence whatever that this is true. None.
Trump is the original birther… how can we trust him to tell the truth.
What’s the Kenyan doing today?
sarge22 – And in walks the genius.
So you did meet him today.
How can women support Hillary she defended a 44 year old man that brutally raped a 12 year old girl in 1975. Then laughed about it in an interview 5 years later on how she got him only 2 month sentence. Some protector of children and women. Hillary words really matter. That’s a story that the press is hiding, some morals.
Clinton is a lawyer and what do all lawyers good at, they will defend their cause no matter how guilty or how &tupid it may sound. This country is full of Grubber subjects that will eat up every word she says and will believe those words are true and will vote for her….Clinton said, they were bankrupt by the time they were out of the WH yet she is running to get back in, how &tupid can she be. Clinton calls herself a feminist, but when she found out her husband was having sex behind her back multiple times, she stood by him even after he lied on TV proclaiming he did not have sex with the intern and other women.
It’s unfortunate that you would write something like this from your platform of complete ignorance.
Ms. Rodham (at the time) was ordered to take the case by the trial judge. After asking to be reassigned, the judge refused and the trial went forward. Most of the state’s evidence fell apart after review by an expert medical witness, and the defendant (a relative of the victim) accepted a plea. Lawyers – lots of them – who have looked at this trial believe that a more experienced attorney would have had the entire case thrown out because the state had no case.
You’ve lied about what Mrs. Clinton was laughing at, but you don’t care about the truth, so I’ll just leave it at that.
Everyone is entitled to a defense. Your opinion would be a lot different if you had been wrongly arrested and tried for something you didn’t do.
He was not wrongly arrested and you would feel different if this was your daughter. Maybe fortunately you don’t have children so you don’t know what it is like.
I’m an attorney, so I understand – obviously better than you do – that everyone is entitled to a good defense. I have children but don’t need to have one of them be victimized to understand the pain involved in assault.
The point is that you made up the whole thing without knowing anything at all about the case – or the fact that the case fell apart at trial – and then you lied about Mrs. Clinton laughing at a victim. Lying does not help build a case.
More propaganda.
Other reputable news sources are reporting that Clinton’s electoral planning is being shredded by the e mail/Clinton Foundation investigations and leaks. I see the SA hasn’t mentioned the New York Federal Prosecutor’s office who announced yet another investigation of the Clinton Foundation. This is being run by field “bulldog” prosecutors, not the admin pukes from the DC DOJ.
by the by, CNN got caught lying by Reuters when Reuters actually spoke to the Secret Service who said they didn’t officially speak to the Trump campaign about his statement.
Your censorship via omission is really getting old and tiring.
They didn’t announce the investigation you mentioned because you lied and made up the whole thing. There is no investigation, despite the right wing nutcase rumors about one.
Lying hasn’t helped Mr. Trump so far. Your lying isn’t likely to help either.
The latest LA Times/USC Poll still puts Hillary ahead by +1. In Texas, Trump has a +11. But, swing over to Maine and Hillary is at +10 even if Stein and Johnson is in the mix, she still polls at +10. The only way Donald can pull this off is if he lets someone else do the talking for him.
Chumps supporters are the original cast of the looney tunes.
Should have been John Kasich. Definitely not the three stooges Giuliani, Gingrich and Huckabee.
humpty trumpy to spend a very, very long vacation behind bars what with a multitude of charges coming his way.
Really? And what investigation, other than Trump Univ, is ongoing and for what crimes? Can you please provide a list of those charges. Can Trump claim “No Criminal Intent”, he was just careless and reckless.
No, he can’t.
Any decent prosecutor would be able to take him to trial, and win a case, for fraud over Trump University.
You have no facts and are lying as usual. Classified emails and Clinton Foundation, now there is the real story. Lock her up. Disgraceful
What about Seth Rich? Not one single word about him and time to end subscription. Auwe!
Don’t think I will renew. I can cut out the middle man (SA) and go directly to CNN.
For those republicans with blind folds;
blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2016/02/26/irs-commissioner-says-donald-trump-audit-scenario-rare/
The King of Story Tellers=Big Liar.
And now, this morning he is saying that his accusations toward Obama and Clinton being isis founders, was “just being sarcastic.” Words matter as Clinton pointed out yesterday; that’s another reason why trump is not fit to be President of America.
Does trump really care the LIES that he feeds his followers??
The simple explanation in this link:
http://www.nydailynews.com/politics/trump-suggests-doesn-care-wins-november-article-1.2747231
Just like filing for bankruptcies, etc., just wipe the board clean and to hell with any/everybody.
Well, if that’s all you got to say he’s not fit, then lets get into the lies of Hillary Cankles Clinton. Would you think those lies makes her not fit? If not, you are double standarding people.
can’t even spell correctly….next.
He’s said that since at least January.
Why all the sobbing now?
Aside from lacking any modicum of discipline and comportment, sorely lacking a grasp of any granular appreciation for public policy and the temperament of a three old with soiled undies, he is obsessed to always playing to a room. Specifically, what allowed him to this current position, i.e, solidifying the base of basically uneducated disgruntled white folks, he now needs to tack to the objective of widening the tent, for other type of voters. This is presidential race 101— what got you here, will not allow you to win the general election, and that should be a simple decision as its a nominal equation.
They should remember that the next time they wonder why so many Trump supporters discount media hysteria about Trump. But what about the conservative media? Notwithstanding some talk radio and Fox News opinion hosts, and a few Trump-friendly political operatives moonlighting as pundits, most of the conservative press is hostile to Trump. If you’ve been reading me over the last year, you know I am part of this group.
I am a senior editor at National Review magazine, which has been extremely critical of Trump for the most part (though we have run some dissenters). Other conservative outlets — the Weekly Standard, Commentary, and the websites the Federalist, HotAir, RedState and the Resurgent — have taken similar approaches. Objections to Trump from the right cover the waterfront, from his glandular personality and narcissistic character to the threat his populism poses to the conservative movement and to the country. But virtually every conservative I know — including those openly saying they will vote for her — thinks Clinton is awful. Indeed, a great many of the mainstream reporters I know think she’s pretty terrible, too. RELATED: The Conservative Media Echo Chamber Is Making the Right Intellectually Deaf As P. J. O’Rourke, the brilliant libertarian satirist, (quite un-satirically) put it on NPR: “I am endorsing Hillary, and all her lies and all her empty promises.
It’s the second-worst thing that can happen to this country, but she’s way behind in second place. She’s wrong about absolutely everything, but she’s wrong within normal parameters.” He added in an essay for the Daily Beast, “Better the devil you know than the Lord of the Flies on his own 757.” Thanks to my fear of spontaneously bursting into flames, I can’t follow O’Rourke all the way to pulling a lever for Hillary Clinton — I’ll write-in some third choice — but I think O’Rourke’s analysis offers insight into the media coverage as well. As has been confirmed for the umpteen-billionth time this week, Clinton is corrupt and deceitful. She and her husband operate as if they are some medieval royal family, above the petty rules and customs that govern the little people. It’s why I’ve been calling them the Medicis of the Ozarks for so long. If you don’t think the Clintons are aloof, entitled graspers and grifters, it’s probably because you haven’t been paying attention. If you don’t think they are aloof, entitled graspers and grifters, it’s probably because you haven’t been paying attention.
And that’s the problem. Their grafting and grifting is so well established, so well known, it never really surprises anyone. Her corruption is priced into politics. In a normal, healthy political system, the Clintons would be shunned like pimps in an Amish colony. But we don’t live there, so the Clintons bore rather than shock. This is Hillary Clinton’s greatest advantage. The devil we know is a boring, paper-pushing bureaucrat.
Meanwhile, the one thing no one can deny: Trump is not boring. It’s possible to love him or hate him, but no one can be indifferent to him. When you drive past a part of town that has been blighted and run-down all your life, you don’t slow down to look at it. But if an 18-wheeler loaded with bovine manure jackknifes on the highway, sending its cargo in all directions, whether you’re horrified or amused, you’ve just gotta slow down and take a gander.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/438914/hillary-clinton-advantage-shes-dull
Another day, another doomsday prediction from the ultra conservative National Review—telling.
Wassup SA?
Got to say, SA is just as bad as the Washington Post, NY Times, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBS on negative articles about Trump. Wish SA would do the same about Clinton, but I know that is a wish that will never be realized.
Well, that’s how “news organizations make their money.” To report on anything and everything news worthy.
If they don’t print “more” news worthy articles on Clinton, then it means they don’t have anything to report. Plain and simple which republican’s find hard to comprehend.
White water, futures trading, Benghazi, IRS, classified emails, Clinton Foundation, blood clots, falling down, blood thinners, criminal brother-in-law, Marc Rich and the corrupt DNC to name a few news worthy articles.
Just more of the same Clin Tron. Of course they aren’t going to mention her own big time credibility problems. If Trump goes down it won’t be quietly. You can be sure of that.
Down to some basic questions: Do we trust him with the nuclear code? Do we wish to have him represent the USA at international meetings? Do we like his thinking on women? For me, the answer is easy. He is a bigot.
This is what should be Top News.
CNN reports that three FBI field offices were in agreement and wanted an investigation launched earlier this year, but the Loretta Lynch-led DOJ pushed back pointing to a preliminary investigation done on the Clinton Foundation a year before, after the book ‘Clinton Cash’ was released.
At that point, not enough evidence was there to launch a case, and some at the Justice Department feared the request for a fresh investigation would look politically-motivated, especially in light of the FBI’s investigation into Clinton’s private email server.
The FBI wanted to pursue a lead from a bank that tipped them off to suspicious activity from a foreigner who had donated to the Clinton Foundation.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3735345/THREE-FBI-offices-wanted-scale-criminal-probe-Clinton-Foundation-Loretta-Lynch-s-Department-Justice-refused-ahead.html#ixzz4H8OuaJNM
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White uneducated folks who can’t keep a job, might not know any better, but the rest of the nation, certainly does:
Hillary Clinton leads Donald Trump in four more battleground states, according to new NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist polls.
In two of the states — both carried twice by President Barack Obama — the Democratic nominee leads by double-digit margins.
In Colorado, Clinton leads by 46 percent to 32 percent, widening the 8 percentage point lead she held before the two parties’ political conventions.
In Virginia, the former secretary of state leads the real estate magnate by 46 percent to 33 percent, widening her 9 point pre-convention lead. Clinton strengthened her position in the state by selecting Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine as her running mate. Her, big mouth Les, not so big elsewhere, didn’t you just yell from the highest mountain top on how Trump will take Virginia????????
In North Carolina, an increasingly diverse state that Obama carried in 2008 but lost in 2012, Clinton leads by 48 percent to 39 percent, widening her 6-point pre-convention lead.
And in Florida — a critical swing state in recent elections — Clinton leads by 44 percent to 39 percent. That represents a narrowing of the 7-point lead she held before the two conventions.
Crickets, crickets………..absolutely awkward silence for the umpteenth time.
Buahahahahahahahshahahahaha!!!
The only poll that really matters is the one on election day. All others are ego fodder.
Obviously that’s not true. Polls matter a lot as to how a campaign is run.
Perhaps you are one of those Trump supporters that does not belief in science? Have no appreciation for methodology and sample size? The power of nominal value and binary findings?? Perhaps…..
For you, I submit Nate Silver a sage in not per se polling, but the art of analysis, in both the aggregate and cumulatively, on the accuracy and veracity of polls. In short, most polls are very accurate and the Trump side is on not just a profound, but historical slide.
We’ve reached that stage of the campaign. The back-to-school commercials are on the air, and the “unskewing” of polls has begun — the quadrennial exercise in which partisans simply adjust the polls to get results more to their liking, usually with a thin sheen of math-y words to make it all sound like rigorous analysis instead of magical thinking.
If any of this sounds familiar — and if I sound a little exasperated — it’s probably because we went through this four years ago. Remember UnSkewedPolls.com? (The website is defunct, but you can view an archived picture of it here.) The main contention of that site and others like it was that the polls had too many Democratic respondents in their samples. Dean Chambers, who ran the site, regularly wrote that the polls were vastly undercounting independents and should have used a higher proportion of Republicans in their samples. But in the end, the polls underestimated President Obama’s margin.
Now the unskewers are back, again insisting that pollsters are “using” more Democrats than they should, and that the percentage of Democrats and Republicans should be equal, or that there should be more Republicans. They point to surveys like the recent one from ABC News and The Washington Post, in which 33 percent of registered voters identified as Democrats compared to 27 percent as Republicans. That poll found Hillary Clinton ahead by 8 percentage points.
But let’s say this plainly: The polls are not “skewed.” They weren’t in 2012, and they aren’t now.
The basic premise of the unskewers is wrong. Most pollsters don’t weight their results by party self-identification, which polls get by asking a question like “generally speaking, do you usually think of yourself as a….” Party identification is an attitude, not a demographic. There isn’t some national number from the government that tells us how many Democrats and Republicans there are in the country. Some states collect party registration data, but many states do not. Moreover, party registration is not the same thing as party identification. In a state like Kentucky, for example, there are a lot more registered Democrats than registered Republicans, but more voters identified as Republican in the 2014 election exit polls.
A person’s party identification can shift, and therefore the overall balance between parties does too. Democrats have typically had an advantage in self-identification — a 4 percentage point edge in 2000, a 7-point advantage in 2008 and a 6-point edge in 2012, according to exit polls — but they had no advantage in the 2004 election. Since 1952, however, almost every presidential election has featured a Democratic advantage in party identification.
Here’s the margin that Democrats have had in self-identification since 1952, according to the American National Elections Studies and, starting in 1972, exit polls.
enten-democratic-edge-1
And it’s not crazy to think Democrats will have an advantage in party identification in 2016. With a controversial nominee, many Republicans might not want to identify with the GOP, and may be calling themselves independents.
You should also be skeptical of other attempts to reweight pollsters’ data. One website, LongRoom, claims to “unbias” the polls using “actual state voter registration data from the Secretary of State or Election Division of each state.” The website contends that almost every public poll is biased in favor of Clinton.
Think about what that means: The website is saying that a large number of professional pollsters who make their living trying to provide accurate information — and have a good record of doing so — are all deliberately biasing the polls and aren’t correcting for it. Like many conspiracy theories, that seems implausible.
I’d also point out that election offices from different states collect different data. Some states don’t have party registration; other states don’t collect data on a person’s race; some states collect data on neither. There are some companies that try to fill in missing data for each state, though it costs a lot to get that data. Isn’t it more plausible the people who get paid to know what they are doing are right, while some anonymous website on the internet with unclear methodology is wrong?
Of course, unskewing is simply one of many ways of pretending Clinton hasn’t jumped out to a large post-convention lead against Donald Trump. You could also ask us to imagine a world without polls. You could allege, without any evidence, that outright election fraud will take place. Or you point to Trump’s rally sizes, though George McGovern in 1972, Walter Mondale in 1984 and Mitt Romney in 2012 all had large crowd sizes and lost.
People, though, should stick to reality. Right now, Clinton is leading in almost every single national poll. She leads in both our polls-plus and polls-only forecasts. That doesn’t mean she will win. The polls have been off before, but no one knows by how much beforehand, or in which direction they’ll miss. For all their imperfection, the polls are a far better indicator than the conspiracy theories made up to convince people that Trump is ahead.
Homie, Stick to REALITY….
Wassup, SA?
My PHD in multivariate statistical analysis, along with 20 years work with major ad agencies in NY, Chicago, LA, and Atlanta, has given me the understanding that no probability is 100% Perhaps you don’t understand probability projections.
You mean PhD?
Ikefromeli – Exactly. The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
Republican insiders are more convinced than Democrats that Donald Trump is so far behind Hillary Clinton that he can’t win in November.
Roughly half of Republican members of The POLITICO Caucus — activists, strategists and operatives in 11 swing states — believe that Trump’s path to 270 electoral votes is basically shut off after another week in which the GOP nominee appears to have ceded ground in national and almost EVERY battleground state.
Buahahahahahahshahahahahahah!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/donald-trump-electoral-votes-gop-insiders-226932#ixzz4H8lmgJcj
OK, let’s be serious, Trump is not even going to be close–not a stitch. It’s over, so the more germane question is how large and historic will be the loss??
Towards those ends, here is how it might go down:
We’re going to spend a lot of time over the next 87 days contemplating the possibility of a Donald Trump presidency. Trump is a significant underdog — he has a 13 percent chance of winning the election according to our polls-only model and a 23 percent chance according to polls-plus. But those probabilities aren’t that small. For comparison, you have a 17 percent chance of losing a “game” of Russian roulette.
But there’s another possibility staring us right in the face: A potential Hillary Clinton landslide. Our polls-only model projects Clinton to win the election by 7.7 percentage points, about the same margin by which Barack Obama beat John McCain in 2008. And it assigns a 35 percent chance to Clinton winning by double digits.
Our other model, polls-plus, is much more conservative about Clinton’s prospects. If this were an ordinary election, the smart money would be on the race tightening down the stretch run, and coming more into line with economic “fundamentals” that suggest the election ought to be close. Since this is how the polls-plus model “thinks,” it projects Clinton to win by around 4 points, about the margin by which Obama beat Mitt Romney in 2012 — a solid victory but a long way from a landslide.
But the theory behind “fundamentals” models is that economic conditions prevail because most other factors are fought to a draw. In a normal presidential election, both candidates raise essentially unlimited money and staff their campaigns with hundreds of experienced professionals. In a normal presidential election, both candidates are good representatives of their party’s traditional values and therefore unite almost all their party’s voters behind them. In a normal presidential election, both candidates have years of experience running for office and deftly pivot away from controversies to exploit their opponents’ weaknesses. In a normal presidential election, both candidates target a broad enough range of demographic groups to have a viable chance of reaching 51 percent of the vote. This may not be a normal presidential election because while most of those things are true for Clinton, it’s not clear that any of them apply to Trump.
A related theory is that contemporary presidential elections are bound to be relatively close because both parties have high floors on their support. Indeed, we’ve gone seven straight elections without a double-digit popular vote victory (the last one was Ronald Reagan’s in 1984), the longest such streak since 1876-1900.
silver-landslide-chart-1
As with other theories of this kind, however, there’s the risk of mistaking what’s happened in the recent past for some sort of iron law of politics. Historically, the U.S. has ebbed and flowed between periods of close presidential elections — such in the late 19th century or early 21st century — and eras in which there were plenty of lopsided ones (every election in the 1920s and 1930s was a blowout).
These patterns seem to have some relationship with partisanship, with highly partisan epochs tending to produce close elections by guaranteeing each party its fair share of support. Trump’s nomination, however, reflects profound disarray within the Republican Party. Furthermore, about 30 percent of Republican or Republican-leaning voters have an unfavorable view of Trump. How many of them will vote for Clinton is hard to say, but parties facing this much internal strife, such as Republicans in 1964 or Democrats in 1972 or 1980, have often suffered landslide losses.
Perhaps the strongest evidence for a potential landslide against Trump is in the state-by-state polling, which has shown him underperforming in any number of traditionally Republican states. It’s not just Georgia and Arizona, where polls have shown a fairly close race all year. At various points, polls have shown Clinton drawing within a few percentage points of Trump — and occasionally even leading him — in states such as Utah, South Carolina, Texas, Alaska, Kansas and even Mississippi.
Just how bad could it get? Let’s start by giving Clinton the 332 electoral votes that Obama won in 2012. That’s obviously not a safe assumption: The race could shift back toward Trump, and even if it doesn’t, Clinton could lose states such as Iowa or Nevada, where her polling has been middling even after her convention bounce. But as I said, we’re going to focus on Clinton’s upside case today.
So I’m going to list the states Romney won in order of how easy it is for Clinton to flip them, according to our polls-only model.1 The number in parentheses by each state represents the point at which the model estimates it would flip to Clinton, based on her lead in the national popular vote. For instance, South Carolina (+9.5) means that Clinton would be favored in South Carolina if she leads by at least 9.5 percentage points nationally, but not by less than that. These projections are based on where the model has each state projected currently, along with each state’s elasticity score, a measure of how responsive it is to changes in the national environment. Here goes:
North Carolina (+3.2): It wouldn’t be any surprise if Clinton carried North Carolina, which Obama narrowly won in 2008. But Obama lost North Carolina in 2012 despite winning by about 4 percentage points nationally. This year, it looks like Clinton would win North Carolina with a 3 percentage point national victory. In other words, North Carolina has drifted slightly bluer relative to the rest of the country and is closer to being a true tipping-point state this year.
Arizona (+7.1): Arizona and Georgia have been flickering between light blue and light red in our polls-only projection recently. That’s because the model figures each state would be a tossup with Clinton ahead by about 7 points nationally, and that’s where the forecast has been for the past few days. Arizona is the fourth-most-Hispanic state after New Mexico, Texas and California, although historically its Hispanic population has voted at relatively low rates. A strong Hispanic turnout, perhaps coupled with gains for Clinton among Mormon voters (about 6 percent of Arizona’s electorate), might swing the state to her.
Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District (+7.1): Nebraska and Maine award one electoral vote to the winner of each congressional district. That came in handy for Obama in 2008, when he won Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional district, which consists of Omaha and most of its suburbs. District boundaries were redrawn after the 2010 Census to make them slightly tougher for Democrats, but Omaha’s highly-educated demographics — we estimate that 47 percent of voters in the district have a college degree, comparable to Virginia or Connecticut — could wind up being favorable to Clinton. There’s been no polling in the district yet, so its position on this list is based on the model’s guesses based on its demographics and voting history.
Georgia (+7.2): In some ways, Georgia might be more promising than Arizona for Democrats’ long-term future. It has more electoral votes — 16 to Arizona’s 11 — and could serve as part of a bloc of states (along with Virginia and North Carolina) that could eventually offset losses for Democrats in the Rust Belt. It’s easy enough to see how Georgia’s demographics are favorable for Clinton: It has a substantial black population, but also an increasingly well-educated white population, with lots of migration from the Midwest and the Northeast.
Let’s pause here to see what the map would look like if Clinton wins by 8 percentage points nationally — close to where her lead in the polls has been over the past week or so. This map you see below is worth 375 electoral votes, close to the 365 electoral votes Obama won in 2008 when he beat McCain by 7.3 percentage points. In fact, the map is identical to 2008 but for three changes: Georgia and Arizona turn blue, while Indiana (which surprisingly went for Obama in 2008) remains red:
Buahahahahahahahahahahahahahah!!!!!!!
Right now, it looks like a 360-390 electoral vote win for Mrs. Clinton. There appears to be no way for Mr. Trump to win. He’s finished.
Indeed. On the popular vote, Mitt was behind about 5 million, I think, Trump, will be in the 8-9 million deficit area.
Notice how the gang (sarge, les, Keoni, ronin, Kuro, thos…et al) are becoming noticeably absent as the news for Trump gets more and more dismal??? They love crickets…..
It’s hard to find a silver lining in the incredibly dark cloud Trump has created. The RNC sees a disaster coming in November, which is why they’re now urging candidates to avoid Trump. With any luck, he’ll drag both the Senate and the House down with him. The numbers in the electoral college are impossible for him now.
You’re right … crickets.
Did y’all hear what happened to Hillary yesterday? She was visiting an old folks home, and leaned over to a little blue haired lady in a wheel chair, stuck out her hand, & said, “Do you know who I am?”
The woman thought a minute, then said, “No, but if you’ll go up to the front desk, they can tell you.”
sarge22 – You should learn how to become a more graceful loser.
Sarge,,is this related to the Fox News footage which they edited??? The same Fox News propaganda machine lead by a serial sexual predator, in which we now finding out paid millions in settlements and the CFO just fired….??
No
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is not optimistic that he will be in charge of the Senate come November ― and Donald Trump, he implied, is not helping matters.
McConnell told a civic group in Kentucky on Thursday that the chances of the GOP retaining control of the Senate were “very dicey,” the Associated Press reported.
The party’s Senate majority was always going to be tenuous this year, according to McConnell, with 24 Republican-held seats up for grabs, compared to just 10 Democratic-held seats.
Great strategy.
The American President at the time, Bill Clinton, and his Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, insisted that all prisoners be released. Thus Mohammad Atta was freed and eventually thanked us by flying an airplane into Tower One of the World Trade Center. This was reported by many of the American TV networks at the time that the terrorists were first identified. It was censored in the US from all, pass this on!