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The day of Donald Trump’s acceptance speech is a good time for another poll analysis, I figure. There are 121 new polls added since the previous analysis. A handful of them are newly-discovered older polls, but the majority are newly-released polls. Fifty one of the polls come from a 50-state + D.C. Morning Consult series that was conducted over the preceding three months. The data are newly released, but are not necessarily the most current.
I should mention that only a few polls include surveys conducted this week, and none of them fully cover the G.O.P. convention. So think of this as the pre-conventions baseline analysis. Subsequent analyses will gradually include polls taken after the Republican National Convention. Of course, the same thing will happen following the Democratic National Convention early next month.
As with the previous analysis, a batch of 100,000 simulated elections has Clinton winning 100,000 times and Trump winning 0 times. Clinton received (on average) 338 to Trump’s 200 electoral votes. In an election held now, Clinton would have a 100.0% probability of winning.
Notice, however, that Clinton’s average electoral vote total has dropped a bit from a mean of 354. We should expect at least some improvement for Trump as Republican voters accept and, in many cases, embrace him as the G.O.P. nominee.
There are two striking things about this analysis compared to the previous. First, many of the “outlier” states have “fallen in line” with expectations from recent elections: Nevada has gone from Red to Blue, Arizona from Blue to Red, Colorado from Red to Blue, Kansas from Blue to Red, Missouri from Blue to Red, Mississippi from Blue to Red and Kansas from Blue to red.
The second thing is that many states have become more polarized in the direction expected. You can look at the current map and the previous map to see this easily. For instance, many traditionally blue states have become “bluer”: e.g. OR, WA, MN, WI, MA and NJ. And many traditionally red states have gotten redder: TX, AR, LA, GA, UT, and ND are examples.
In other words, the states are falling into line as we would expect from previous elections. This suggests to me that this will be a conventional election with the battlelines coming down to the battleground states of recent elections. For the moment, Clinton leads in most of those battleground states in the East (PA, VA, NC, FL), Midwest (IA, WI, MI, OH), and West (CO, NM, NV). Of these, IA is very close, but trending toward Trump in the most recent polls, and Florida shows a slight trend in Trump’s direction.
Here is the distribution of electoral votes [FAQ] from the simulations:
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