Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight, and renowned analyst of polls, gives his analysis of the polls since the second Presidential debate:
We’re spending a lot of time these days diagnosing whether Donald Trump’s position in the polls is merely bad or still getting worse. Most of the evidence on Wednesday — which included the first dusting of state polls since the second presidential debate, on Sunday night — fell into the “still getting worse” bucket. Trump’s chances are down to 14 percent in our polls-only forecast (against an 86 percent chance for Hillary Clinton) and to 17 percent, a record low for Trump, in our polls-plus forecast. …
Trump now trails Clinton by 6.5 percentage points in our popular vote forecast — by comparison, he was 4.6 points back of Clinton a week ago, on Oct. 5, before the videotape or the second debate. So he’s moving in the wrong direction as time is running out. While a Trump comeback is still mathematically feasible — Trump’s 17 percent chance in the polls-plus model, as we’ve pointed out before, is the same as your chances of losing a “game” of Russian roulette — it wouldn’t really have any good precedent in recent American presidential elections.
Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium has been forecasting a Clinton win for quite some time:
Yesterday, Hillary Clinton’s PEC win probability hit 95%.In last night’s debate, the 2005 candid video of Donald Trump saying what he does with women was still on everyone’s mind. In response, he brought up many topics beloved by Republican rank-and-file voters: Bill Clinton, Benghazi, emails…it was a veritable Greatest Hits of 1996-2016. The likely consequence of this scorched-earth strategy is that Republican leaders are trapped. All their base (R) belong to Trump. This will reverberate downticket.
This seems like a good time to reveal one of the Princeton Election Consortium’s own secrets. Thankfully, it does not involve an Access Hollywood video.
Here it is: poll-based Presidential prediction is not very hard.
I guess that is a pretty boring secret. Sorry.
It is an interesting irony that poll aggregation got popular in 2008, a year when there was not that much suspense in the Presidential race. That year, Barack Obama led John McCain for almost the entire campaign season, with the possible exception of the week after the Republican Convention, where Sarah Palin stole the show. That ended up with a 7-percentage-point popular win, and an electoral outcome of 365-173.
And if you want some of that winning progressive-style cheerleading, floridageorge on The Daily Kos provides a roundup of the polls since the second Presidential debate here, which follows individual states.
And what does it mean to Donald Trump? Courtesy CNN:
With Hillary Clinton extending her lead nationwide and in key battleground states, Trump is toying with what might be called “poll denialism,” giving his supporters license to dismiss the discouraging data.
“Even the polls are crooked,” he said at a Monday night rally, expressing disbelief that he is losing to Clinton in Pennsylvania. “Look, we’re in a rigged system.”
Trump has only topped Clinton in one scientifically conducted poll in Pennsylvania since it became clear he would be the GOP’s nominee back in April, while Clinton has been in the lead in 18 of them. In the most recent polls, Clinton holds a double-digit lead there.
His campaign has already been caught distributing a FiveThirtyEight map showing he’d be winning – if suffragism had failed back in 1919. Problem is, they had stripped the context from the map so the donors they were soliciting would think they’re winning.
If he gets blown out in a landslide, what’s he going to do? Claim every state but Alaska has somehow been corrupted? Or just sell the TV rights to the campaign’s retrospective for a ridiculous sum?
