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Sunday, October 30, 2016

It's Getting Really, Really Close -- Is Trump Actually Ahead Now?

The movement of the polls towards Trump and away from Hillary Clinton is continuing.  As of the moment, the Real Clear Politics Average in a four way race shows Clinton up by 3.4%.  That, however, may paint a misleadingly rosy picture for Hillary.

As we head into the last full week of campaigning, three things are happening:

1.  Even before the FBI reopened the criminal investigation into Clinton, the race was getting much closer.  Of the eight polls in the RCP average, only two contain any polling done after the FBI announcement.  Even for the two that include post-announcement data, the majority of the polling was done before the announcement.  That means that the race had become a statistical tie before the FBI got into the picture. State polls were also closing.  For example, this morning we got the NY Times/Siena poll in Florida (which stopped polling the day before the FBI announcement) showed a 4% lead for Trump.

2.  The polling organizations are no longer coming forward with polls showing huge leads for Clinton even while most others show it close.  We are getting close enough to the election, that the pollsters want to be accurate in order to preserve their reputations for the future.  Just look at a poll like the ABC tracking poll.  It has only been around for ten days.  At the start of the ten days, it was showing Hillary up by 12% on a repeated basis.  Now, just a few days later, it is showing Hillary up by 1%, a swing of 11%.  Those kinds of moves don't normally happen in presidential polling especially when other polls don't reflect that kind of massive move.  ABC and its pollster are being forced to be accurate by the impending election day.  If there is any doubt that ABC rigged the results of the early versions of the tracking poll, one only need look at today's news release.  ABC has a large section of today's release in which it tells voters not to worry about the big move towards Trump.  ABC tells us that there was a big move away from Bill Clinton in 1992, but he still won.

3.  The enthusiasm gap is starting to have a real impact.  In many of the polls, voters who had been leaning towards Clinton are now being classified as unlikely to vote.  It's not that they jump to Trump supporters, but rather that they decide they just won't bother to vote for Hillary.  One has to assume that this pattern will be intensified after the FBI revelation.  If just a few percent of Hillary's supporters stay home on election day, Trump will win.  On the other side, enthusiasm among Trump supporters for him is rising.  Those who were wavering after the video mess of a few weeks back are back supporting him again.  For example, independents who had gotten to about an even split a few weeks ago are back supporting Trump by at least a 20% margin.

The polls are all looking backwards, though.  If we were able to measure the race today, we might well find Trump in the lead.  We can tell from the numbers that in the two tracking polls that questioned voters after the FBI announcement that Trump was ahead in that portion of the results.  One has to wonder how the voters will react to Hillary's attack on the FBI director for daring to tell the nation that she is once again under criminal investigation.  I don't think that will solve her problem.  She remains the target of a criminal investigation.  She remains enmeshed in another never-ending scandal.  She makes clear what the next four years would be like with her in the White House.  And, worst for Hillary, she remains the one in the spotlight rather than Trump.  This year, whenever the focus has been on Hillary, her numbers have tanked.  When the focus has been on Trump, he too has fared poorly.  The longer the email scandal holds the main place in the media, the more likely a Trump victory becomes.

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