In 2016, Hillary Clinton lost the electoral college by about 80,000 votes correctly distributed in three states despite winning the popular vote by three million votes. Hillary won 227 electoral college votes. She lost Wisconsin by less than 23,000 votes or less than 1 % (.77%) . Hillary lost Pennsylvania by 44,292 votes or .72% . Hillary lost Michigan by less than 11,000 votes or .23 % . We won the governorship in Wisconsin in 2018 defeating the odious incumbent Scott Walker. We won the governorship in Pennsylvania by 17.1% . We picked up 11 seats in the Pennsylvania house of representatives. We won the governorship in Michigan by 9.5% . We add the lost electoral college vote in Maine to what Hillary won and it is now worth 233 electoral college votes. We need 37 electoral college votes.
Wisconsin 10 electoral college votes
Michigan 16 electoral college votes
Pennsylvania 20 electoral college votes
Arizona 11 electoral college votes
Georgia 16 electoral college votes
Ohio 18 electoral college votes
Florida 29 electoral college votes
North Carolina 15 electoral college votes
The easiest two states to win are Wisconsin and Michigan. The 2018 elections are a good sign. Other than last time, the last time Michigan went for a republican was in 1988 and the last time Wisconsin went for a republican was 1984 and the last time Pennsylvania went for a republican was in 1988.
Returning to our theme: We had 233 electoral college votes and we added Michigan and Wisconsin because those are the two most likely states from 2016 to go from red to blue and the evidence from 2018 also suggests they will go blue and so that adds 26 electoral college votes. That puts us at 259 electoral college votes. Don’t forget that this includes the single electoral college vote in Maine that we lost in 2016. I say that because that single electoral college vote could be the difference between winning and losing (or getting to 269 electoral college votes each and then I have to look that up and plan on including that later at the bottom of the diary). Now, did you notice that Arizona is exactly 11 electoral college votes ? So, 259 electoral college votes plus 11 electoral college votes would get us to 270 electoral college votes exactly and we win ! So, that single electoral college vote could be important ! I am looking at you Maine who are going to defeat Susan Collins to make up for Doug Jones !
Okay, so we are at 259 electoral college votes. Our states that could take us over the top once again were: Arizona (11) , Georgia (16) , North Carolina (15), Ohio (18), Florida (29), Pennsylvania (20). If we don’t win Wisconsin and Michigan, then I seriously doubt that we will win enough of the other states to make up for it. We remember that the Trump’s protectionism protected aluminum and steel workers in Pennsylvania. I think we are slight underdogs in every state other Pennsylvania.
So, we are just going to look at the polls in each of these states. Providing that we win Wisconsin and Michigan (and Minnesota which was pretty close last time), then we do just need one of these states. Wisconsin’s most recent head to head polls were Trump +3 , Trump +5, Trump +3, Trump + 8,Trump + 14 … :
Arizona (11) : Biden +3, Trump +1 (over Warren) , Trump +4 (over Sanders)
North Carolina: Biden + 2 , Trump +1 (over Warren) , Sanders +1, Trump +4 (over Buttigieg)
Pennsylvania (20) : Biden+9, Warren +5, Sanders +5
Georgia (16) : Biden +8, Warren +3 , Sanders +4, Buttigieg +3 , Harris +1
Florida (29) : Biden +2, Trump +4 (over Warren) , Trump +1 (over Sanders)
Wisconsin (11) : Trump +3 (over Biden) , Trump +5 (over Warren) , Trump +3 (over Sanders), Trump +8 (over Buttigieg) , Trump +14 (over Klobuchar)
Wisconsin (11) : Biden +2 , Trump +2 (over Warren) , Sanders +1
Michigan (16): Biden +1, Biden +12, Trump +5 (over Warren) , Warren +8, Sanders +4, Sanders +14,
Georgia (16) (* A pollster) Trump +2 (over Bloomberg) , Trump +3 (over Harris) , Trump +4 (over Buttigieg), Sanders +3, Warren +1, Biden +4
North Carolina (15) (*A- pollster) : Trump +4 (over Buttigieg) , Trump +1 (over Warren) , Sanders +1
Pennsylvania (20) * (A+pollster) : Warren +5, Sanders +5, Biden +9
Wisconsin (11) : Booker +1, Trump +14 (over Klobuchar), Trump +8 (over Buttigieg), Trump +5 (over Warren), Trump +4 (over Sanders), Trump +3 (over Biden)
Wisconsin (11) (*A+ pollster) : Even (Sanders / Trump), Trump +2 (over Warren), Biden+2,
Sanders +2, Even (Warren/Trump)
North Carolina (15) (*A+pollster) : Biden +3, Trump + 4 (over Sanders) , Trump +4 (over Warren) , Trump +2 (over Biden), Trump+3 (over Warren), Trump +3 (over Sanders) — all LV top is RV.
Florida (29) (*A+pollster): Trump +2 (over Sanders), Trump +4 (over Warren), Biden +2,
Trump +1 (over Sanders) , Trump +4 (over Warren) , Biden +2 --Top LV, Bottom RV
Pennsylvania (20) (*A+pollster): Trump+ 1 (over Sanders) , Trump +2 (over Warren) , Biden +1
Sanders +1, Even (Warren and Trump), Biden +3
Ohio (18) : Biden +6, Biden +8 , could not find any others
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What conclusions should we draw if any from this polling data ? I tend to think it is not necessarily super reliable since we have not even had our first primary contest. When a candidate wins an election, then she will get great press and that may improve her head to head numbers against Trump. In addition, when a candidate becomes better known, then their head to head numbers against Trump may improve. Further, when we actually have a nominee then the party will likely coalesce around the nominee since we know how important it is to defeat Trump. Until then, a partisan who favors one primary candidate may not admit to pollsters that they would vote for a different candidate from their party in the general election against Trump because they do not want to strengthen the argument for that candidate. So, the head to head general election polls may not be super reliable.
Nevertheless, they are a mixed bag for sure. One pollster has all of our candidates except Senator Cory Booker losing Wisconsin . Senator Cory Booker is a fine candidate, but it is hard to believe that he alone wins Wisconsin . A good pollster has Trump winning Pennsylvania except against Biden, but even in that poll Biden only leads Trump by one point (well within the margin of error) ! That is not good. Pennsylvania should be our third easiest state to win (after Wisconsin and Michigan) — of the swing states. On the other hand, the same A plus rated pollster had us crushing Trump in Pennsylvania ! So, it is hard to know what to believe. That just means that we need to work that much harder and not take anything for granted . Georgia looks competitive, but that could change when we get closer to the election.
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Therefore, I would say that it is a mixed bag. If the election were today, I would say that we probably would win because we are close enough to winning or actually winning a lot of the swing states in the polls and we would have to lose most of them to not win the electoral college. On the other hand, it could happen. This election is far from certain. If it looks like this when we get to November in 2020, then we could easily lose enough states to lose the electoral college. Bottom line: This election is not at all a sure thing ! Most of the polls of most of the swing states are within the margin of error. If anything goes wrong, then we could lose any or all of them. Just because Trump is very unpopular does not mean that we will win these states ! If we all do everything we can to win and we all unite around our candidate no matter who it ends up being, then we will win !!
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I will put the following National polls here because they are by an A+ pollster. I have a master’s degree in mathematics. I will say here without fear of contradiction that if one of our candidates truly were to win the popular vote by 8 percentage points , then it would be highly unlikely that we would lose the electoral college. Is it possible for a candidate to win the popular vote by eight percent and yet lose the electoral college ? I suppose it is possible, but is so unlikely that if it happened, we should look for some alternative explanation (other than that it happened randomly) because the probability of it happening naturally is 1 in 50,000,000 . Again, this is a A + pollster — ABC News / Washington Post from Oct 27-Oct30.
Buttigieg +11 (Buttigieg 51-Trump 41), Harris +9 (Harris 51 — Trump 42),
Warren + 15 (Warren 55- Trump 40 ) , Sanders +14 (Sanders 55 -Trump 41),
Biden +17 (Biden 56 — Trump 39)
I remember this kind of lead for Clinton about a year away from the election. I bookmarked it to remind me not to get complacent ! The above polls were taken recently; thus, they are a year away from the election. A lot could happen in a yearWe had the Comey thing, Russians targeted people of color with facebook ads and there were other ads so that African Americans would not vote for her or would not vote, The Russians interfered and Hillary Clinton had been attacked for 30 years by both Republicans and Democrats alike. She had almost as bad an approval rating as Trump did. So, what happened to that huge lead in national polls was a unique series of events. The national polls were taken before the hit in her polling numbers from the Comey event had shown up. So, the national polls were out of date, they no longer accurately reflected where her numbers were on the day of the election. So, her national polling lead dropped from 7 points to 3 points and that is close enough that one could win the popular vote, but lose the electoral college.
A way to think this is to think about each state’s relationship to the nation as a whole. So, you could take the national poll and subtract 3 or 4 points (if you are looking at a Democratic candidate’s national poll numbers ) and depending upon the candidate you might get about where Ohio probably is. So, each state’s polling is related to the national polling. It is undoubtedly a complex relationship, but we might be able to estimate where a state is based upon how much more progressive or more conservative the state is than the nation as a whole. And that will also be affected by the candidate, the nominee. We cannot nominate somebody with such a horrible favorable rating like Clinton had last time. We cannot do that again. But if Trump and the republicans with help from the Russians used facebook ads and trickery and dirty politics to keep some of our Democratic leaning voters from going to the poll, then they can make up enough percentage points to barely win Wisconsin.
We have to anticipate that they are going to try to use deep fakes and other dirty tricks and facebook and lies and conspiracy theories and target our most vulnerable (least educated, easiest to get to NOT VOTE) voters and send them lies and deep fakes that make it look like our candidate said something that she did not and conspiracy theories , they are going to send all this stuff to our most vulnerable voters. They are going to pick people who are infrequent votersj, people who may or may not vote but if they do vote, then they vote for us. And so they might target person 1 who if they do vote, will almost certainly vote for us. They will show that person facebook ads that are lies, they will show them deep fakes that make it look like our candidate said something unacceptable (remember “super-predators”) and they will target person 1’s friends too. Then, person 1 and person1’s friends end up not voting. And they will do this in key battleground states that we need to win in order to win the electoral college.
This is what they did in 2016 in Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania (but without the deep fakes because they were not yet ready to be deployed) and it depressed our turnout. We should have had more voters in 2016 than 2012 . 538 says that Comey’s intervention was enough to cause us to lose the electoral college.
I say all of that because we need to be vigilant ! We need to make sure our friends are not deceived or lied to and we need to vote together because when we all vote together, we win !