Roughly a week ago, this blog predicted that one of the major poll aggregators would place Trump ahead of Clinton in the national polls by the end of September 6. During this time, the TPM poll tracker had the closest spread -- a mere 1.4 points .
Fortunately, that spread widened today, to a whopping 2.2 points.
Good news -- but hardly great news. Unfortunately, TPM also sounded this worrying note:
We have two new horserace polls out this morning (perhaps more shortly). But before that I want to note a big issue that's been affecting the numbers in recent weeks: a major difference between the premium national phone polls and various online polls. The former have shown a relatively unchanged race, with Clinton holding a sizable lead, while the latter have shown a tight or even tied race. The problem is that the premium polls don't come out that often. And we haven't had many recently. Welp, this morning CNN/ORC has a poll out at it shows Trump 49%, Clinton 48%. In a four way race, Trump is up by two. There's also a NBC/SurveyMonkey poll out showing Clinton up by 6, more in line with what we've seen over the last month.Here's CNN's story about that poll.
So what's up? As I've said before, I take the premium national phone polls more seriously than the online polls. CNN is the former, NBC/SurveyMonkey is the latter.
Trump tops Clinton 45% to 43% in the new survey, with Libertarian Gary Johnson standing at 7% among likely voters in this poll and the Green Party's Jill Stein at just 2%.This is a controversial matter, of course.
MSNBC 'unskewed' a CNN national poll on Tuesday that showed Donald Trump leading Hillary Clinton by two points, re-weighting the results to match the 2012 electorate and showing a four-point lead for the former secretary of state.
The poll of likely voters, released Tuesday by CNN/ORC, showed Trump ahead of Clinton nationwide in a four-way contest, 45 percent to 43 percent. But MSNBC host Chuck Todd explained that the poll, in his network’s estimation, may have oversampled white voters without a college degree, one of Trump’s strongest groups.
With the numbers adjusted to reflect how the electorate shook out four years ago, Clinton’s two-point deficit shifted to a four-point lead, 46 percent to 42 percent.I just don't see how Hillary can prevail when the "liberal" media are so deeply prejudiced against her -- even though all right-wingers and many progressives remains transfixed by the delusion that she has the media in her pocket.
At least one CNN personality has admitted that there is an anti-Hillary bias:
Bash was talking about the presidential debates when she provided a perfect example of the media’s double standard in the way they cover Trump and Clinton.It's not as though Trump will have less power if he wins, so why should he be judged by a different standard?
Dana Bash said, “I think the stakes are much higher in this debate and all the debates for Hillary Clinton because the expectations are higher for her because she’s a seasoned politician. She’s a seasoned debater. You know, yes we saw Donald Trump in the primaries debate for the first time, but he is a first-time politician. So um, for lots of reasons. Maybe it’s not fair, but that’s the way it is. The onus is on her.”
Since when does being a first-time candidate mean that the media expects less and grades on a curve?
I'm also troubled by Nate Silver's latest:
Between the unusually early conventions and the late election — Nov. 8 is the latest possible date on which Election Day can occur — it’s a long campaign this year. But just as important, many voters — close to 20 percent — either say they’re undecided or that they plan to vote for third-party candidates. At a comparable point four years ago, only 5 to 10 percent of voters fell into those categories.They won't. If they're not for her now, they never will be. Johnson is taking more from the Clinton column than the Trump column. The BernieBros don't really care about socialism, because they know almost nothing about economics. They know only that they hate anyone named Clinton.
High numbers of undecided and third-party voters are associated with higher volatility and larger polling errors. Put another way, elections are harder to predict when fewer people have made up their minds. Because FiveThirtyEight’s models account for this property, we show a relatively wide range of possible outcomes, giving Trump better odds of winning than most other statistically based models, but also a significant chance of a Clinton landslide if those undecideds break in her favor.
We will talk later about the Trump Foundation -- which, as some of you may recall, was the topic of a post here before it became the focus of so much recent attention.
And yes, I'm still predicting a Trump victory in November. I may have been wrong this time. But I wasn't that wrong, was I?
6 comments:
Isn't the popular vote count pretty much irrelevant?
This chart from www.electoral-vote.com says their data is from one week ago (a rolling week).
http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2016/Pres/tipping_point.html
Their stats seem more "Republican friendly" than other polls.
Seems for your theory to work, Trump has turn Virginia, Ohio, Nevada, North Carolina, and Florida which seems unlikely. So, as a betting person, I would say Hillary is looking pretty good at this point. Unless your prediction of some crazy dirty tricks/terrorist attack comes true.
Today's RCP averaging shows ~7 polls where Clinton leads, one a tie, and the CNN poll with Trump up 2 points. The tied and CNN poll are crap, provably. And Clinton's still up 4 points in their top line average. Oh, did I mention Fox's latest poll in the list has Clinton at +6%?
Take out the provably fatally flawed two polls (or correct them about +5 points to Clinton for known sample problems), and you'd have more than a 4 point lead. 6+ points, maybe 7.
Trump's fantasy of playing large in blue has proven to be self-delusion. NBC today calls Missippi, Georgia, and Texas as toss-up states??? Clinton can lose every single swing state and still win with 273 EVs. Trump's one surprise is keeping... Iowa... close. ??
These fundamental numbers are far from bad or at a negative tipping point. The phony top line poll numbers foster that false impression by averaging in.
Awaiting fundamentals down the stretch are the debate performances, the air campaign, and GOTV capabilities. Advantage Clinton, x3. It isn't close in any of them. Trump is eking out his business cash flow problems (falling business returns from the campaign blow back) by paying himself millions out of campaign funds, while stiffing his top 10 campaign aides any of their payments.
Clinton has the Obama turnout team and their hi-tech social media targeting expertise, that had R political pros with mouths agape when they revealed some of what they did in public fora.
Clinton generally whipped OBAMA in their debates, so I really cannot imagine her not prevailing against Trump, big league. Part of her evident coasting in August, besides raising a ton of money for not only herself but for the party down ticket, was to prep her appearance. She looks as good as she has in some years, and as shallow as that seems, it cannot be discounted in the debates on television. (Cf: Nixon v Kennedy debates, tv v. radio polling of who won.)
Trump's apparent bribing of Florida's Attorney General Pam Bondi to not prosecute Trump U with an illegal charitable contribution, since it was announced illegal and fined by the IRS, and shows a likely coverup by the false charity's name reported, is being pushed into notice as the MSM has been shamed for not reporting it, by Paul Krugman's NY Times op/ed piece 'Is Hillary being Gored?,' and others.
Is all this just consolation, and wishful thinking? Perhaps, but I'll take it, and sleep far better as a result. Although I do credence the October Surprise redux theory you raise as a potential contrary factor. As a CT guy, I must, by nature.
But how ironic and stupid would it be for people to accept at face value what is only the latest in BS claims that, over and over again, have actually exonerated Clinton in the end? That includes now Benghazi, the e-mail charges, and the Clinton Foundation matters. I remember 'the boy who cried wolf' fable. Even simple villagers who had been fooled many times learned to discount his reports, eventually.
I take the snapshot as detailed above of more accurate polling- to indicate the part of the electorate that has figured this out by now, in the face of all the decades of charges notwithstanding, as the villagers did in the fable. I pray that it is so, and I want to believe it, since you've spooked me so badly, I must admit.
Trump is like Agent Smith in The Matrix trilogy. He was seemingly unstoppable, until the machine system turned to its apparent greatest foe, Neo (the XXth), to put him to an end, even as the machine system's human opponent enemies in Zion survived certain destruction in the bargain. The PTB used or humored Trump up to a point. But the mil-intel communities reject him as a loose cannon, as do the prior ruling neo-con faction, and their kissing cousins ruling faction in waiting, the Clintonite neo-liberals. The war party and its two wings, the neo-cons and neo-liberals, will not allow Putin his way in the end, however cleverly he plays his purported Trump cards.
Trump: "(Top generals) will have 30 days to submit to the Oval Office a plan for soundly and quickly defeating ISIS."
This is typical "I will solve all your problems" messianic Trump marketing.
It's different from the presentation of all serious US presidential contenders in recent decades.
Many probably hear him as saying that Daesh can be defeated within 30 days. Those who don't watch so much wrestling won't be suckered by the juxtapositional technique of his advertising. They will realise that what he actually says is that Daesh can be defeated "quickly".
The idea is that whereas previous US administrations have had their heads in the clouds, and probably their hands in the tills too, Trump is the Big Man Who Can Get Things Done - the man who cuts the crap, who makes all problems easy to solve. Social problems, military problems, whatever.
But in war the law is laid down by the enemy.
No fucking casino owner who believes "Come the hour, come the man" can change that. Orbiting satellites didn't change that. Cyberwarfare doesn't change it either.
What if the military REALITY is that the US CANNOT defeat Daesh quickly without nuking the shit out of the "Moooslims"? What if they can't achieve the goal without doing the nuking so thoroughly that little has to be spent by the US government on administering what's left? Without murdering not millions but hundreds of millions of people?
Let's look for something else that might work "quickly". Expel all Muslims from Europe and the US who earn less than half the average income (impossible without fascism); put Gulf wealth under Arab League control and make them spread it about so as to end unemployment in non-Gulf Arab countries. The oil sheikhs are going to buy that, right? No? So how are you going to coerce them? As soon as you think it through, it soon turns into the first option: nuclear apocalypse.
And in this horrendous megadeath scenario of bye-bye to the Arab world and hello to fascism in Europe and the US, where will the oil come from for what remains of the now much-reduced world economy? The obvious answer is Russia. Where the fuck else can it come from?
No, you weren't wrong about at least one thing. Looks like Roger Stone's crew are busy cooking up fake emails and feeding them out through Trump's media. October surprise coming.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/through-the-trumpster-looking-glass
"Crazy" dirty tricks took both the 2000 and 2004 elections. And the crazy media narrative allowed the Dems to simply gift the primary to Obama. If you don't see the media drumbeat of 24/7 Trump as alarming, you probably won't mentally register any "crazy" dirty tricks this election, either, as you seem not to have registered Florida or Ohio in the past elections, Pulp.
Joseph, not sure you've seen the social media stories on young black women not being into Hillary? Sorry, no links this morning. Basically, they say these women want some reason why to vote for Hillary, as opposed to simply being "against Trump" AND they've bought into the Berniebots' slander of Hillary/Bill's culpability in mass black incarceration.
Nope...no Trump victory. I just got back from realclearpolitics and all is well. Especially the Battle States...no electoral path for Trump at this time.
You might have been right about CNN though. I was surprised to see such a hit piece yesterday about Bill making so much money from GEMS & Laureate (enough to make Trump jelly) while Hillary was on warpath about Trump U. Apparently, they all have their share of lawsuits and unhappy people thinking they got screwed, etc. Even more so with Laureate because they were so much more successful. Anyway, surprised to see that on CNN.
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