I Still Think Clinton Will Win, But It'll Be Close

How an election can change in just a few weeks. Roughly two weeks ago, Hillary Clinton commanded a roughly six-point lead in the two-way RealClearPolitics polling average, and a four-point lead when Gary Johnson and Jill Stein were included. Her lead in the Electoral College was commanding, and seemingly insurmountable.

Two weeks later, Clinton is still ahead. But she now leads by just two and a half points in the two-way race, and by a similar margin in the four-way race—still the candidate to beat, but in a race far closer than many could have imagined in the aftermath of her triumphant acceptance of the Democratic nomination a month ago.

State polling results tell a similar story, with statistical ties in Florida and Ohio, and a somewhat narrowing race in Pennsylvania and possibly Virginia. New polls out last week from reliably Democratic Northeastern states like New Jersey and Rhode Island show a much closer gap than expected, though Clinton still holds a strong single-digit lead there.

Despite all this, Clinton is still ahead in both national polls and the Electoral College, and state-level polling still shows struggles for Trump in Arizona and Georgia especially, as well as North Carolina. If Clinton were to win all three of those states it would offset any potential lose of Pennsylvania, Florida, or Ohio. And, while Clinton continues to lose ground due to the twin scandals of her personal email server and evidence of cronyism at the Clinton Foundation—as well as her blanket smears of Trump supporters—Trump continues to hurt himself by attacking Republicans like Jeff Flake and consistently praising Vladimir Putin.

I’ll admit, my suggestion from July that Clinton pursue a “Fifty-State Strategy” now seems premature. I somehow underestimated the hyper-partisanship of today, which ensures that even a candidate as fundamentally flawed as Donald Trump has the ability to keep the race reasonably close. Of course, Clinton’s own historic unpopularity, combined with the reluctance of the electorate to give the same party control of the White House for twelve straight years, also helps Trump immeasurably. (It’d be fascinating to see by how much Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio would be ahead right now, had one of them won the nomination instead.)

I still think that, in the end, Trump will lose a race that literally any of the sixteen other Republican candidates in the primary could have won. Trump’s own unpopularity, combined with Clinton’s innate appeal to many voters as the first woman president, will eventually put her over the top. But either way, it should be close.