A place for discussion of the particularly diverting presidential election campaign under way in the United States. There are of course a great many forecasters and poll aggregators whose authority you might well judge higher than my own, but if for no other reason than personal amusement, I present the following aggregation of all the national polling recorded at HuffPost Pollster. This involved calculating bias adjustments, applying crude weightings to pollsters based on experience and performance, determining an “others” trend from such data as was available for that, and then determining trends for the major candidates’ shares of the non-others vote. The current reading has Hillary Clinton on 47.7% and Donald Trump on 38.5%, which is slightly less favourable for Trump than the HuffPost Pollster aggregate and correspondingly better for “others”.
Correction: Hispanics’ share of California’s population is projected to approach 50% in 2060. Currently, Net Immigration from Mexico has plummeted.
It’s really hard to see anything other than a solid HRC victory in November. In part that’s because any Democrat starts with a big in-built advantage in the Electoral College, with States that have voted Dem in the last six elections, the so-called “Blue Wall” (to wit, Washington, Oregan, California, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, Maine, Delaware, Maryland and DC) have votes that add up to 242 votes, just 28 short of victory. A generic Republican, by contrast, can only rely on about 191 such votes (and even some of those look a bit shaky this time around).
Of the swing states, New Mexico, Colorado, Virginia and New Hampshire (totaling a further 27 votes) are all trending Democratic pretty strongly, so much so that they can probably also be put in the Dem column, while Clinton is also mostly ahead in Florida, North Carolina, Iowa, Nevada, and Ohio. She is also very competitive is hitherto GOP strongholds like Georgia, Mississippi, Arizona and Utah.
The point is that any GOP candidate has a very narrow path to victory, and it will take a far less polarising figure than Trump to thread that needle. My guess is that we’ll see a final score similar to Obama’s second win, around 330-odd to around 200, but it could yet blow out to a Clinton landslide of 400+. Really hard to see just how Trump gets to 270.
The real interest, then, is in Congress. In the Senate, the map favours the Dems, though current polling suggests that some of those endangered GOP Senators might yet hold on. The Dems need a net five gains to win the Senate back (assuming a Clinton win, and therefore VP Kaine casting the deciding vote), and these look most likely in Illinois, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Indiana, with decent chances in North Carolina, Arizona, Florida & Missouri. The GOP has a shot at winning Nevada, where Harry Reid is retiring. the Dems will be hoping to win big, though, because the next mid-term Senate map in 2018 favours the Republicans. If the Dems do in fact win back the Senate, we can probably expect a few Supreme Court justices to retire, most likely the very liberal Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Stephen Breyer.
The House is altogether harder for the Dems, given the blatant gerrymander in place, but it’s not entirely out of the question. The Dems need to flip 30 seats to win back the House, which to my mind seems a bit too hard, but if HRC succeeds in winning over Republican-leaning suburban women (as she is reportedly trying to do), then it’s an outside chance. Given how badly Trump may end up doing, you certainly can’t rule it out.
Finally, a plug for my favourite US politics blog: http://www.electoral-vote.com/
steve777 @ #41 Thursday, August 18, 2016 at 11:21 am
Didn’t Moore say he thinks Trump will win?
Triton
re M.Moore – he did indeed, he also tipped both McCain & Romney to win
I saw something on Kos yesterday wtte that Trump has offered one of the networks the continuation of his reality show ‘The Apprentice’ from the Oval Office if elected. I’ve long suspected he’s offered all of the networks (on the sly) unprecedented 24/7 inside-the-White-House access if elected. This explains why they’ve propped up his campaign with so much (mainly fawning) exposure on primetime since the start.
I also can’t shake a nagging feeling that Democratic voters are going to blow a once in a generation chance to elect a Pres/Congress that could give a 7-2 liberal Supreme Court within 1 or 2 terms. Such a court would undoubtedly strike down Citizens United, gerrymandering and voting rights restrictions. The alternative of course, a 7-2 conservative court, would strengthen all three and probably strike down Obamacare and same-sex marriage.
* and may well nix Roe v. Wade, not by striking it down completely but by placing the issue in the hands of the individual states*
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