Friday, August 12, 2016

We Need To Redefine Battleground States

If the current Presidential polling is correct - and yes, it is still too early although it's getting to the point where the numbers have to be taken serious - then the states we USED to call toss-up battleground states are no longer in play:


States like Virginia and Colorado - with relatively large suburban, conservative-leaning voters - are currently for Hillary over Trump in double digits. That is almost unheard of outside of solid Blue states like California, Illinois and New York where urban and progressive-minded voters tend to be. North Carolina - which went Obama in 2008 but then flipped to Romney (and went Republican at the state level) in 2012 - is now solidly for Hillary. Florida is the only state where Trump even has a wisp of a chance polling five points under Hillary... and given how Florida went Obama TWICE and that our state is full of Hispanics and educated Whites, there's little hope for Trump - outside of voter suppression - to flip the Sunshine State any time soon.

And this is covering both variables of head-to-head (Hillary vs. Trump) and with the four-player race (Hillary vs. Trump vs. Johnson vs. Stein). Having the third-party candidates in the mix does not do Trump any favors and does not hurt Hillary one bit.

If we had to play out the Electoral College right now, the map is going to look like this. 


Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com


Sadly, Utah is currently polling for Trump, which kinda hurts the narrative about Mormons hating the cheeto-faced ferret-wearing sh... uh, Mormons don't like the cursing, but anywho, you get the drift. Thing is, the polling still shows a tight race with Hillary within 5 points: Given how conservative Utah is, that is shockingly good performance for her. And something that she can use to turn Utah into a new battleground state.

And this map doesn't show how close Iowa is... and Indiana... and Mississippi... and South Carolina... and Texas is still a maybe... and...

Key thing remains: Getting the vote out is important. Polling is one thing, actual voting - and voting in large enough numbers to thwart any rigging - is everything.

Get to it, America. Stop Trump. Vote Hillary. I'm with her.

3 comments:

Infidel753 said...

States like Virginia and Colorado - with relatively large suburban, conservative-leaning voters

Relatively large voters? I know the obesity epidemic is an ongoing issue, but.....:-)

There's one other factor that could make things even worse for the Republicans. The spikes in Latino voter registration we've been seeing could foreshadow an increase in the historically-low Latino voter turnout level -- something which polls might not be capturing, since they tend to assume turnout models will be similar to previous comparable years. All the states with large Latino populations except Texas are already blue on your map, but the popular-vote margin matters too -- to blunt accusations of fraud, and to show the rest of the world that the US has (mostly) not gone dangerously insane.

Gary Johnson and Egg McMuffin could be a factor as well. Third candidates normally fade as the election approaches and people realize that a vote for a third candidate is effectively a vote for the opposing major candidate, and they shift back to their own major candidate. But in this case, a lot of the conservatives leaning toward third candidates really consider Hillary less bad than Trump, so they may not shift back to Trump. On our side, the people leaning toward Stein will mostly shift back to Hillary since Trump is easily worse.

dinthebeast said...

Maybe folks in NC aren't all that happy with their experiment in Republican majorities right about now. Last night Steve Kornacki's map showed that Hillary could lose Florida AND Ohio and still win. I don't want to jinx anything, but can that be a wave I'm seeing rising up in the distance?

-Doug in Oakland

Pinku-Sensei said...

I interrupt this comment section to report that Colorado has the lowest obesity rate of any state in the U.S.

http://stateofobesity.org/states/co/

We now resume the regularly scheduled discussion of the presidential election.