This is it.
Tomorrow we finish voting, and the whole thing is likely over. The Presidential Election has been a long ride this cycle, giving us a year and a half of misery.
However if Donald Trump can’t turn it around, I suspect he’s going to be miserable for a long time to come.
A bunch of states have flipped back and forth in the last few weeks. The net result has Trump ahead in close states. Donald Trump leads Hillary Clinton in three of the four closest states, those with leads of 2 or less (NC, NH, NV), with Clinton ahead in Florida. That’s a lot of coin flips in his favor.
But despite being slightly ahead in many close states, Trump is still behind 297-241. That’s not winning. That’s losing, and hoping the polls are wrong. That’s failing to catch up even when Clinton had a week of bad email headlines.
If we exclude the RealClearPolitics toss-up battleground, Clinton starts with a base lead of 216-164. Clinton needs 54 electoral votes of the remaining 158. Trump needs 106 of those 158. That means Trump has to have most of the close states fall his way.
Clinton can get 54 votes among the battleground simply by winning Pennsylvania (20), Michigan (16), Colorado (9), then either Florida (29), North Carolina (15), or Ohio (18). In fact with Florida she doesn’t need Colorado.
Unless the polls are badly wrong (and they can be), Trump needs an improbable series of events to happen in close states, despite being notorious for having a very poor “ground game” in key states like Pennsylvania and Nevada.
Trump has been getting many Republican leaners to “come home” as Gary Johnson’s polling has crashed. But it doesn’t appear to be enough.
If Trump wins tomorrow, it’s the greatest defeat for polling since Truman defeated Dewey.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member