Welcome to our brave new post-primary world, so spanking-brand new that we don’t really have any polling to mark it. All we can do is check out where things were a week ago, when Donald Trump had the GOP side sewn up, and we were still wrapping up our side.
But as we know, the last two weeks haven’t been kind to Trump, who is all kinds of stupid. And the results are predictable:
Look at the blue dots, and you can see some of the most recent polling is already starting to pick up a rise in Clinton's numbers. By next week, expect Clinton to be in the mid- to high-40s. After the convention, she’ll be in the low 50s and she'll never look back. Meanwhile, watch Trump struggle to get out of the high-30s, low-40s.
While I prefer to use Pollster.com aggregates, there still isn’t enough data for scores in most states, so I'm going with the RCP aggregate in the short term for everything except the national trends.
2016 BATTLEGROUND PRESIDENTIAL MATCHUPS
|
6/10 |
5/12 |
US* |
C+4.6 |
C+3.6 |
AZ (11) |
C+1 |
C+3.5 |
CO (9) |
N/A |
N/A |
FL (29) |
C+1.6 |
C+4.3 |
GA (16) |
T+4.2 |
T+5 |
IA (6) |
C+4 |
C+4 |
MI (16) |
C+8.3 |
C+10.5 |
MO (10) |
T+5 |
T+7 |
NM (5) |
n/a |
N/A |
NC (15) |
T+1 |
C+3.3 |
NV (6) |
n/A |
N/A |
NH (4) |
C+6.5 |
C+9.8 |
OH (18) |
C+1.4 |
C+3 |
PA (20) |
C+4 |
C+7 |
VA (13) |
C+4.3 |
C+13 |
WI (10) |
C+11.6 |
C+11.5 |
The state-level polling is too sparse right now to get a solid read on trends, but it does suggest that Trump benefited from that same April primary-victory bump that you can see on his national trendlines at the top of this post. Makes sense. Very little of that state-level polling is recent enough to reflect these last two terrible weeks for him, and certainly not the last couple of days. Much of the movement in those numbers isn’t from new polling, but from old polling rolling off the totals.
Now with Clinton wrapping up business on our side of the aisle, hopefully we’ll see a rash of new state-level polls giving us a real baseline for the state of the post-primary race. As is, even factoring Trump’s now-evaporated bump, it’s not close. That’s a lot of blue up there. And with only North Carolina flipping over the last month, it’s still an Electoral College blowout:
ELECTORAL COLLEGE
CLINTON |
TRUMP |
343 |
195 |
The question this year won’t be whether Clinton will win the White House. It’s whether we can take advantage of this historic opportunity to absolutely decimate GOP ranks in the House, Senate, and local levels, while damaging the GOP brand for the next several cycles. That’s why we’re going to fight extra hard this year, not out of fear of Trump, but in excitement over the opportunities he’s opening up.