All year, the polls have shown Hillary Clinton ahead of Donald Trump, by as much as 13 percent. The betting odds have been as much as 5:1 in her favor, and Nate Silver, of FiveThirtyEight, has been giving her an 80% chance of winning the presidency. Until now. Tuesday, he said, if the election were held today, Trump would have a 57% chance of winning. That sounds like a landslide.
The gambling money is still in Hillary’s favor, but she keeps slipping. Now the odds are 2:1, meaning if you bet two dollars on her, you’d get three back. It wasn’t long since you’d get only one extra back for risking five.
This is beginning to look like the 2008 primaries, in which Hillary was the expected nominee until some rookie from Chicago—Black at that—challenged her. Poll after poll is showing a shift toward Trump, and the British Guardian says this could be the tip of the iceberg, since there’s evidence that people are embarrassed to tell a pollster they’re for Trump, according to Breitbart.
GOP presidential nominee Donald J. Trump is riding a wave of momentum coming out last week’s Republican National Convention in Cleveland with a solid bump in the polls in his favor ranging from three to six percentage points.
The latest CNN-ORC International poll has Trump ahead of Hillary Clinton 48 to 45 percent, compared to their July 17 poll with Trump trailing the former first lady 42 percent to 49 percent, giving Trump a six-point pop with Clinton losing four points.
The CBS News poll released Monday had Trump ahead of Clinton 44 percent to 43 percent, but the CBS-New York Times July 14 poll had both candidates in a 40-to-40 tie. The Morning Consult poll, also released Monday, has Trump with a 44 percent to 40 percent lead, a shift from the Morning Consult poll released July 16 that had the two locked up with Trump at 39 percent to Clinton’s 41 percent.
Mona Chalabi wrote in the UK-based The Guardian that liberals should be seriously concerned about the movement in the polls that have moved in his favor, because he have been performing better in online polls compared to polls conducted with live operators. This gap points to a reluctance of voters to admit that they are supporting Trump to a live person, but without the personal interaction, so-called “Secret Trump Supporters”come out of shadows.
Even more shocking for Dems is the swing of “sure-thing” confidence among Hillary supporters to a newfound joy among Trump supporters, according to Politico.
Political analyst Nate Silver’s latest forecast has Republican nominee Donald Trump with a 15 percentage point-greater chance of beating presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton if the election were held today, according to FiveThirtyEight.
Silver’s “now-cast,” updated with fresh surveys on Monday, shows Trump’s current likelihood of winning at 57.5 percent, compared with Clinton’s 42.5 percent. In the 11 battleground states, Colorado, Virginia and Michigan would go to Clinton, while Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Iowa would go to Trump.
The breakdown shifts a bit between the Electoral College and the popular vote. Silver’s model currently predicts the popular vote going 45.4 percent to Trump vs. 45.1 percent to Clinton, but the Electoral College giving Trump a wider margin of victory, 285 votes and Clinton 252.6.
Part of the swing would be due to a “post convention bounce,” but Nate Silver says there is an important caveat, according to Breitbart.
Silver wrote that it is very common for post-convention bounce to mask the reality of a losing campaign. “John McCain and Sarah Palin did so in 2008, for example, and even Walter Mondale led a couple of polls in 1984. But those bounces do not always turn out to be predictive.”
While the polls in the last three elections have been steadier than in other eras, Silver said that he sees the 2016 race taking on wilder swings that were seen in other times.
One of the interesting features on the site is their “now-cast,” which gives the chances of a candidate winning were the election held “today,” and according to the Monday’s FiveThirtyEight: “It suggests that in an election held today, Trump would be a narrow favorite, with a 57 percent chance of winning the Electoral College.”
Meanwhile, Michael Moore, leftist filmmaker, says in The Huffington Post, that there are five reasons why Donald Trump will be our next president.
1. Midwest Math, or Welcome to Our Rust Belt Brexit. I believe Trump is going to focus much of his attention on the four blue states in the rustbelt of the upper Great Lakes – Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. . . And now The Outsider, Donald Trump, has arrived to clean house! You don’t have to agree with him! You don’t even have to like him! He is your personal Molotov cocktail to throw right into the center of the bastards who did this to you! SEND A MESSAGE! TRUMP IS YOUR MESSENGER!
2. The Last Stand of the Angry White Man. Our male-dominated, 240-year run of the USA is coming to an end. A woman is about to take over! How did this happen?!. . . This monster, the “Feminazi,”the thing that as Trump says, “bleeds through her eyes or wherever she bleeds,” has conquered us — and now, after having had to endure eight years of a black man telling us what to do, we’re supposed to just sit back and take eight years of a woman bossing us around?
3. The Hillary Problem. Can we speak honestly, just among ourselves? And before we do, let me state, I actually like Hillary – a lot – and I think she has been given a bad rap she doesn’t deserve. But her vote for the Iraq War made me promise her that I would never vote for her again. . .Let’s face it: Our biggest problem here isn’t Trump – it’s Hillary. She is hugely unpopular — nearly 70% of all voters think she is untrustworthy and dishonest.
4. The Depressed Sanders Vote. Stop fretting about Bernie’s supporters not voting for Clinton – we’re voting for Clinton!. . .This is not the problem. The fire alarm that should be going off is that while the average Bernie backer will drag him/herself to the polls that day to somewhat reluctantly vote for Hillary, it will be what’s called a “depressed vote” – meaning the voter doesn’t bring five people to vote with her. He doesn’t volunteer 10 hours in the month leading up to the election.
5. The Jesse Ventura Effect. Finally, do not discount the electorate’s ability to be mischievous or underestimate how any millions fancy themselves as closet anarchists once they draw the curtain and are all alone in the voting booth. It’s one of the few places left in society where there are no security cameras, no listening devices, no spouses, no kids, no boss, no cops, there’s not even a friggin’ time limit. You can take as long as you need in there and no one can make you do anything. . .millions are going to vote for Trump not because they agree with him, not because they like his bigotry or ego, but just because they can.
Remember, the voting odds are still two-to-one. If you bet on Trump, and if he wins, you’ll double your money.
