It Really Was a Bad Week for Trump

[silverscreenselect]

The Atlanta Journal came out today with a new poll that shows Hillary Clinton with a four point lead on Donald Trump in Georgia. When third-party candidates are added, the lead is still three points. That latter finding is consistent with most polls that find that Hillary does about 1.5% poorer in a poll that includes third party candidates.

This latest finding is consistent with a host of new polls showing Hillary with about a ten-point lead nationally and substantial leads in various battleground states. Needless to say, it's very hard to see how Trump wins if he loses the state of Georgia. While I'm very pleased that my home state is finally showing some good judgment, I have a feeling that the race may tighten a bit up to the debates, unless (and this is always a possibility with Trump) he keeps shooting himself in the foot on a near daily basis. One thing's for sure, if Trump is down by near double digits when the debates start, he won't be able to boycott them claiming that they are "rigged."

http://politics.blog.ajc.com/2016/08/05 ... n-georgia/

[Bob Juch]

The Atlanta Journal came out today with a new poll that shows Hillary Clinton with a four point lead on Donald Trump in Georgia. When third-party candidates are added, the lead is still three points. That latter finding is consistent with most polls that find that Hillary does about 1.5% poorer in a poll that includes third party candidates.

This latest finding is consistent with a host of new polls showing Hillary with about a ten-point lead nationally and substantial leads in various battleground states. Needless to say, it's very hard to see how Trump wins if he loses the state of Georgia. While I'm very pleased that my home state is finally showing some good judgment, I have a feeling that the race may tighten a bit up to the debates, unless (and this is always a possibility with Trump) he keeps shooting himself in the foot on a near daily basis. One thing's for sure, if Trump is down by near double digits when the debates start, he won't be able to boycott them claiming that they are "rigged."

http://politics.blog.ajc.com/2016/08/05 ... n-georgia/

Trump has supposedly said that if the polls show he'll lose, he'll quit.

[SpacemanSpiff]

The Atlanta Journal came out today with a new poll that shows Hillary Clinton with a four point lead on Donald Trump in Georgia. When third-party candidates are added, the lead is still three points. That latter finding is consistent with most polls that find that Hillary does about 1.5% poorer in a poll that includes third party candidates.

This latest finding is consistent with a host of new polls showing Hillary with about a ten-point lead nationally and substantial leads in various battleground states. Needless to say, it's very hard to see how Trump wins if he loses the state of Georgia. While I'm very pleased that my home state is finally showing some good judgment, I have a feeling that the race may tighten a bit up to the debates, unless (and this is always a possibility with Trump) he keeps shooting himself in the foot on a near daily basis. One thing's for sure, if Trump is down by near double digits when the debates start, he won't be able to boycott them claiming that they are "rigged."

http://politics.blog.ajc.com/2016/08/05 ... n-georgia/

Trump has supposedly said that if the polls show he'll lose, he'll quit.

I don't believe that for a minute. Say what you will (good or bad) about him, "quitter" doesn't seem to be one of them.

A "nuclear meltdown take no prisioners and take everyone along with him" exit going into the elections (and after), maybe; but not "quitter."

[Pastor Fireball]

Apparently, Casino Mussolini's misfortune is now bleeding into dark-red Utah. Remember how, earlier in the year, I berated Bob Juch for saying that Trump wouldn't win a single state in November and I said that Trump would definitely win Utah because it's Utah?

Well, it seems that the huge Mormon population don't exactly take a fancy to Trump's multiple marriages and religious attacks. Salt Lake City TV station KUTV conducted a poll that was released on Monday. Hillary and Donald are tied at 35% in Utah, with Libertarian Gary Johnson polling at 13%. It's only one poll, but it's quite a significant one.

http://kutv.com/news/local/utah-could-v ... n-50-years

[Ritterskoop]

I saw a poll (can't remember which one, though) that had Trump, Clinton and Johnson all in the 24-27% range in Utah.

Folks there who voted for Romney have only Johnson as a good representative of some of their interests.

I'm becoming a big fan.

[SpacemanSpiff]

Alabama is still showing to be "solidly Trump."

http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2016/0 ... t-comments

The problem, as the electoral map goes, is that Trump needs to win pretty much ALL of the swing states; and adding any new ones to the pile that were previously on the Trump side of the tally isn't going to help him at all.

As illustrated in the 270towin.com website, the Democrats have 42 ways to get the 21 electoral votes they should need to win (Georgia is now in that mix). The Republicans have 23 ways to get the 115 votes they need. (There are also 10 combos that lead to ties, so give those to the Republicans as well.)

[silverscreenselect]

In 2012, Gary Johnson got a little over 1% of the vote here in Georgia. In the AJC poll today, he was at 11%. "Never Trump" Republicans are quite vocal here in Georgia, including Erick Erickson, who hosts the afternoon drive time talk show on the leading AM station in Atlanta. He's been bashing Trump as much or more than Hillary on his show nearly every day now. I think Johnson is the recipient of a lot of that anti-Trump ire.

However, I do think that what you're going to see is some serious soul searching on both sides in any state that is perceived to be very close come Election Day. It's easy to be "Never Trump" in Kansas or "Never Hilary" in California, but if Georgia stays very close, I think a lot of the "Never Trump" voters may have a change of heart.

An interesting sidelight here in Georgia is that the Senate race is reasonably close too, with Republican Johnny Isakson up by about five point. If it remains close (there is a Libertarian on the ballot), but Isakson (or his Democratic opponent) doesn't get over 50%, then under Georgia law, there will be a runoff on January 10, after the new Senate is otherwise sworn it.

[Pastor Fireball]

In 2012, Gary Johnson got a little over 1% of the vote here in Georgia. In the AJC poll today, he was at 11%.

New Georgia poll from a group called JMC Analytics, taken on August 6 and 7, gives Hillary a 44-37 lead on Donald. Gary Johnson has 7%.

That AJC poll you posted on Friday was not an anomaly. Georgia really is in play this year. That's probably gonna force Donald to spend resources on what was once a reliably red state. Resources that would be diverted from, say, Florida or Ohio.

Also, Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) became the first sitting Republican senator to publicly announce that she cannot vote for her party's presidential nominee.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... t-politics

[Bob Juch]

[Bob78164]

Nate Silver's polls-plus forecast now has Secretary Clinton a slight favorite to win Georgia. --Bob

[Pastor Fireball]

New poll out of Utah, via Dan Jones: Trump 37%, Clinton 25%, Johnson 16%. This is the first poll out of Utah that has given Trump a double-digit lead, albeit only 12 points. Very interesting that Johnson has 16%--one of the highest numbers I've seen for him so far in any state--and a whopping 22% are undecided.

[Pastor Fireball]

Hoo boy. There's an outside chance that Kansas is in play this year.

Trump 44%
Clinton 39%
Johnson 8%
Source: SurveyUSA (taken August 3-7)

These numbers aren't too surprising when you consider that the Republican Party in general has been cratering in the Sunflower State for a while, mostly thanks to Gov. Sam Brownback's bankrupting economic policies. Just last week, tea partying congressman Tim Huelskamp--whom you might remember from his failed attempt to overthrow then-Speaker John Boehner in 2013--lost his party's nomination to a moderate Some Dude named Roger Marshall. On top of that, about a dozen neocon legislators at the state level--including the State Senate Majority Leader--also lost their primaries to moderates.

This is only one poll, so unless other polling outfits see the same thing, Kansas will probably stay dark red. One thing for sure is that the political climate has become very inhospitable for the radical right--even in dark red Kansas.

[Bob78164]

In Nate Silver's Polls-Plus forecast, Arizona has been toggling between pink and light blue for the last few days. And I'm thinking Ann Kirkpatrick has a real shot against McCain. I'm thinking that enough that I sent her some money. --Bob

[Bob Juch]

In Nate Silver's Polls-Plus forecast, Arizona has been toggling between pink and light blue for the last few days. And I'm thinking Ann Kirkpatrick has a real shot against McCain. I'm thinking that enough that I sent her some money. --Bob

Thank you, so have I! She's currently my Representative and I'd love to see her as my Senator. McCain's sole TV ad has been that Kirkpatrick is proud of voting for Obamacare which, "has been a disaster for Arizona." I can't believe he's so out of touch with reality.

The latest polls show Clinton leading Trump here.

[SpacemanSpiff]

Just looking over the latest Fivethirtyeight.com reporting. Besides them beefing about a site, longroom.com, that is making the rounds claiming their polling shows Trump will win, and that all the other polls are biased for Hillary (nevermind that said site's principal's bios are nondescript and have no one in the real world with those names, and the website is at a domain where they pay to keep their identity a secret*), they report some interesting things.

Without bogging into details, the biggest is that the Big Three swing states - Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio (the last a must-win for ANY Republican, historically) are all swinging to Hillary. Ohio I figured would be treacherous for The Trump because, let's face it, Mr. Kasich wants no part of him. But the Keystone State is the one surprising me - their weighted average poll shows Hills to be ahead 49.4% to 41.3%

http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/201 ... nsylvania/

I know Mr. Trump needs all of the swing states to pull this off. It's beginning to look like he will get very few of them. And his behavior of the past few days starts to wreak of desperation, which isn't going to bring over anyone new to his side. (Say what you will or won't about the "Second Amendment People" thing, but accusing the President and your opponent of founding ISIS is something else, and is not subject to "it depends upon what 'is' is" and is can not in any way be construed as a joke or a misspeak.)

* weblink for said article http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/who ... nst-trump/

[Pastor Fireball]

Trump 41%
Clinton 39%
Johnson 5%
Source: PPP (taken August 9-10)

That poll is from South Carolina. Not North Carolina... South Carolina.

This I definitely did not see coming.

A week is a long time in politics and it's highly unlikely that this state will flip in November, but the human Caps Lock key is running out of weeks to convince enough Americans that he should have his finger on the nuclear button.

[SpacemanSpiff]

Trump 41%
Clinton 39%
Johnson 5%
Source: PPP (taken August 9-10)

That poll is from South Carolina. Not North Carolina... South Carolina.

This I definitely did not see coming.

A week is a long time in politics and it's highly unlikely that this state will flip in November, but the human Caps Lock key is running out of weeks to convince enough Americans that he should have his finger on the nuclear button.

The grand irony is my retired father-in-law moved from PA (where he moved to so he could be around like-minded conservative evangelical Christians) to SC last year (primarily because of the cold, but I gathered that the conservatives around him in Waynesboro PA weren't conservative enough for him, nor the Christians there Christian enough; hence the move to the Low Country). Those numbers are a bit of a surprise, given how well Mr. Trump is polling with the evangelicals.

AFTERTHOUGHT: These numbers nationally are why you're seeing the downticket folks in the GOP going apoplectic, and wanting the RNC to disavow their own nominee. That request, in such a massive public amount (and who knows how much behind the scenes) is something I don't recall in my lifetime in the Republican party.

[Bob78164]

According to Nate Silver's polls-only forecast, Trump has less chance to win Ohio than Secretary Clinton has to win Texas. Or Mississippi. --Bob

[Estonut]

According to Nate Silver's polls-only forecast, Trump has less chance to win Ohio than Secretary Clinton has to win Texas. Or Mississippi.

Would that be the same Nate Silver who has also made these predictions?

What exactly has Silver been saying? In September, he told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that Trump had a roughly 5-percent chance of beating his GOP rivals. In November, he explained that Trump’s national following was about as negligible as the share of Americans who believe the Apollo moon landing was faked. On Twitter, he compared Trump to the band Nickelback, which he described as being “[d]isliked by most, super popular with a few.” In a post titled “Why Donald Trump Isn’t A Real Candidate, In One Chart,” Silver’s colleague Harry Enten wrote that Trump had a better chance of “playing in the NBA Finals” than winning the Republican nomination.

Multiple times over the past six months, Silver has reminded his readers that four years ago, daffy fly-by-nighters like Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann led the GOP field at various points. Trump’s poll numbers, he wrote, would drop just like theirs had. In one August post, “Donald Trump’s Six Stages of Doom,” Silver actually laid out a schedule for the candidate’s inevitable collapse.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ ... wrong.html

[Pastor Fireball]

According to Nate Silver's polls-only forecast, Trump has less chance to win Ohio than Secretary Clinton has to win Texas. Or Mississippi. --Bob

I find that Texas prediction hard to believe, despite the growing Latino population. I will eat a hat if Clinton even comes within 10 points of winning Texas.

Mississippi, on the other hand, could be interesting. There hasn't been a poll in that state since March 30, and it had Clinton only down by 3 points against the man whom Fareed Zakaria recently called "a bull____ artist" on live TV--not once, but multiple times. Of course, that was back when both were still in active primaries. And before Trump insulted the Khan family and babies. And before everybody tried to interpret Trump's Second Amendment comment. And before Gary Johnson gained traction.

[SpacemanSpiff]

Mississippi, on the other hand, could be interesting. There hasn't been a poll in that state since March 30, and it had Clinton only down by 3 points against the man whom Fareed Zakaria recently called "a bull____ artist" on live TV--not once, but multiple times. Of course, that was back when both were still in active primaries. And before Trump insulted the Khan family and babies. And before everybody tried to interpret Trump's Second Amendment comment. And before Gary Johnson gained traction.

Mississippi, like Alabama, is one that I would doubt would vote for Mrs. Clinton (even though she did live in a neighboring state). Those areas are so staunchly Republican that I can't see anything else. It might be closer than normal -- maybe some vote third party, maybe some don't vote at all for President -- but it'll still go to the "R" column. The last time they went Democratic was Carter in 1976.

EDIT: The last time they went Democrat for POTUS before Carter was JFK; they also went for the American Independent candidate George Wallace in 1968.

[Bob78164]

According to Nate Silver's polls-only forecast, Trump has less chance to win Ohio than Secretary Clinton has to win Texas. Or Mississippi. --Bob

I find that Texas prediction hard to believe, despite the growing Latino population. I will eat a hat if Clinton even comes within 10 points of winning Texas.

Mississippi, on the other hand, could be interesting. There hasn't been a poll in that state since March 30, and it had Clinton only down by 3 points against the man whom Fareed Zakaria recently called "a bull____ artist" on live TV--not once, but multiple times. Of course, that was back when both were still in active primaries. And before Trump insulted the Khan family and babies. And before everybody tried to interpret Trump's Second Amendment comment. And before Gary Johnson gained traction.

Polls-only has Trump currently projected to win Texas by 5.3%.

But I'm not saying either of these outcomes are likely. I'm saying that Trump is that far behind in Ohio. --Bob

[silverscreenselect]

Would that be the same Nate Silver who has also made these predictions?

What exactly has Silver been saying? In September, he told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that Trump had a roughly 5-percent chance of beating his GOP rivals. In November, he explained that Trump’s national following was about as negligible as the share of Americans who believe the Apollo moon landing was faked. On Twitter, he compared Trump to the band Nickelback, which he described as being “[d]isliked by most, super popular with a few.” In a post titled “Why Donald Trump Isn’t A Real Candidate, In One Chart,” Silver’s colleague Harry Enten wrote that Trump had a better chance of “playing in the NBA Finals” than winning the Republican nomination.

Multiple times over the past six months, Silver has reminded his readers that four years ago, daffy fly-by-nighters like Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann led the GOP field at various points. Trump’s poll numbers, he wrote, would drop just like theirs had. In one August post, “Donald Trump’s Six Stages of Doom,” Silver actually laid out a schedule for the candidate’s inevitable collapse.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ ... wrong.html

Silver has explained on his blog a number of times that his polling models were correct about Trump. They consistently showed Trump with leads in the states he wound up winning and turned out to be fairly accurate (much more so that the Democratic polls were this cycle). The problem was that Silver, like many others, chose not to believe them because no one like Trump had ever won before.

We made a big mistake, along with a couple of marginal ones.

The big mistake is a curious one for a website that focuses on statistics. Unlike virtually every other forecast we publish at FiveThirtyEight — including the primary and caucus projections I just mentioned — our early estimates of Trump’s chances weren’t based on a statistical model. Instead, they were what we “subjective odds” — which is to say, educated guesses. In other words, we were basically acting like pundits, but attaching numbers to our estimates. And we succumbed to some of the same biases that pundits often suffer, such as not changing our minds quickly enough in the face of new evidence. Without a model as a fortification, we found ourselves rambling around the countryside like all the other pundit-barbarians, randomly setting fire to things.

Usually when you see a probability listed at FiveThirtyEight — for example, that Hillary Clinton has a 93 percent chance to win the New Jersey primary — the percentage reflects the output from a statistical model. To be more precise, it’s the output from a computer program that takes inputs (e.g., poll results), runs them through a bunch of computer code, and produces a series of statistics (such as each candidate’s probability of winning and her projected share of the vote), which are then published to our website. The process is, more or less, fully automated: Any time a staffer enters new poll results into our database, the program runs itself and publishes a new set of forecasts. There’s a lot of judgment involved when we build the model, but once the campaign begins, we’re just pressing the “go” button and not making judgment calls or tweaking the numbers in individual states.

Anyway, that’s how things usually work at FiveThirtyEight. But it’s not how it worked for those skeptical forecasts about Trump’s chance of becoming the Republican nominee. Despite the lack of a model, we put his chances in percentage terms on a number of occasions. In order of appearance — I may be missing a couple of instances — we put them at 2 percent (in August), 5 percent (in September), 6 percent (in November), around 7 percent (in early December), and 12 percent to 13 percent (in early January).

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how ... ald-trump/

[Bob78164]

And of course, it's the same Nate Silver who went 49 for 50 in the 2008 general (missing Indiana, which Obama won on the strength of a superior ground game) and 50 for 50 in the 2012 general. Which is nice, since we're now talking about the general. --Bob

[Bob Juch]

And of course, it's the same Nate Silver who went 49 for 50 in the 2008 general (missing Indiana, which Obama won on the strength of a superior ground game) and 50 for 50 in the 2012 general. Which is nice, since we're now talking about the general. --Bob

He's now saying Clinton will with 86.4% of the vote.

http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/201 ... id=rrpromo