Conventional wisdom is that Wednesday was a bad day for Team Blue on the polling front; it started out with a surprising poll for Bloomberg (by Selzer, who are considered the “gold standard” in Iowa but are less proven elsewhere) showing Hillary Clinton trailing by 5 in Ohio. A national poll from Quinnipiac showing Clinton leading by 5 nationally provided some relief, but then that was quickly followed by two state polls from CNN, most notably a second poll showing a 5-point deficit in Ohio, and on top of that one showing Clinton down 3 in Florida.
So, you would expect that to wreak havoc with our predictive model, right? Well, there was a drop, but it wasn’t the crash landing you’d probably expect. Hillary Clinton’s odds of winning the presidential race are currently73 percent (in other words, she won simulated model runs on Wednesday night at a rate of 73 out of 100 times). That’s down from 77 percent on Wednesday … but actually up from Monday and Tuesday, when she was at 72 percent.
How did that happen? The short answer is: the model was already treating her as having less than 50 percent odds in Ohio and Florida, something that previously raised a lot of questions (i.e. “why do you have Ohio and Florida light red on the map when the poll average has a small Clinton lead in those states?”). It’s a predictive model, not a “here’s what’s happening today” model, and the fundamentals, at this point, are acting as a bit of a weight on Clinton’s poll numbers. As I’ve said before, running for a third term for the party in power, against the backdrop of so-so economic growth, is always a difficult proposition, historically. So the drop was already, to an extent, “priced in.”
One way to think of a presidential election is that the poll numbers are always trailing the fundamentals, trying to catch up with them (with the state numbers, on top of that, usually trailing the national numbers, since there tend to be not as many state polls). And you could think of Wednesday as: The day that the state polls caught up with everything else (not just potentially difficult fundamentals, but also a national race where the average has slowly drifted down to about4 points … which would point to a nearly tied race in Ohio and Florida, which usually lag the national percentage by a few points).