Decision 2016

So whose election is it now?

August 17, 2016 By Paul Gleiser

One post back and we were saying that it was Trump’s election to lose. A couple of brutal weeks for Trump and some really bad news in the polls and it’s now likely Hillary’s race to lose.

Or is it?

Who is really winning the race for the presidency? Ask most people today and they likely tell you Hillary Clinton.

Donald Trump got a very nice bounce in the polls in late July following the Republican National Convention. Some of the national polls had him in the lead and he was within the margin of error in key states such as Florida and Ohio. He was even within striking distance of Hillary Clinton in traditionally Democratic Pennsylvania.

Then came the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, followed by some stunning unforced Trump errors, and Trump’s numbers began to collapse.

Today, Trump trails Mrs. Clinton by six points in the RealClearPolitics average of polls. He trails in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania. He will not win the White House without at least two of them in his column.

Pundits who do such things are projecting an Electoral College map with an insufficient number of toss-up states left for Trump to thread a path to victory. According to the current RealClearPolitics Electoral College map projection, Hillary Clinton has already won the presidency.

By all traditional measures, Hillary Clinton will be the next president.

But this has been anything but a traditional presidential campaign year. Much of the conventional wisdom upon which pundits and the media rely has been – time and again – proved wrong.

For example, Hillary Clinton is leading in the polls but for some reason can’t seem to draw a crowd to her events. Hillary’s campaign appearances are taking place in high school gymnasiums and union halls. Seldom are they filled to capacity. A typical Clinton campaign event is drawing a couple of hundred attendees.

Donald Trump, by comparison, is holding campaign events at large arenas and is turning people away. The typical Trump campaign event plays to a crowd of ten to twenty thousand.

Wednesday of last week provides an example. On the same day that Hillary Clinton played to a less-than-full high school auditorium in Des Moines, Iowa, Donald Trump played to a capacity crowd at the 20,000 seat BB&T Center in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

So who do we believe is actually winning this election?

All of the predictive metrics that have been used successfully in past elections now say that the election is Clinton’s to lose. The trends in the key states of Ohio and Florida are strongly in her favor. States that Romney won easily in 2012 – Missouri and North Carolina for example – are now toss-ups according to the average of polls.

So why is it that while Hillary Clinton can’t fill a high school gym Donald Trump is filling up 20,000-seat arenas?

Why does a national poll released yesterday by Zogby Analytics – and not yet reported on anywhere by the media – show Clinton leading Trump by only two percentage points – within the margin of error?

Why can’t we get a handle on this election?

On November 9, the pollsters and the pundits will either breathe a sigh of relief or be forced to examine every single thing that they once knew to be true.