These nationwide polls are released fairly often, and recently they've shown more or less a deadheat between the two candidates, but nationwide polls can really only be indicative of the nationwide popular vote, which, as Al Gore can tell you, doesn't determine the winner of a presidential election in our electoral college system. It's the state polls, in a particular handful of states, that matter. You can argue it's a bad system if you want, but right now, it's what matters. And regardless of what the nationwide polls say, Donald Trump has a massive uphill battle ahead of him to make the electoral college math work in his favor, because in the big picture, the state polls haven't looked great for him.
Before even looking at these ten swing states:
Ohio
Pennsylvania
Florida
Virginia
North Carolina
Iowa
Wisconsin
Colorado
Nevada
New Hampshire
If you give every other state to the obvious candidate, Hillary starts with a 216-191 lead in the electoral collage, with 270 needed to win.
Now, let's look at those ten states. I will be using RealClearPolitics polling data.
For starters, let's look at Colorado and Wisconsin.
Colorado used to be pretty red, but Obama carried it twice. Hillary has led in six of the seven polls taken between November 2015 and now - five of those polls taken just this month - by an average margin of +8. It seems likely that she will carry Colorado.
In Wisconsin, Hillary has led ALL fifteen polls taken between August 2015 and now by an average margin of +5.6, which would seem to suggest that despite Governor Walker's conservative union-busting agenda(or maybe because of it), Wisconsin is Hillary's to lose.
Now let's look at Virginia, a state becoming more purple by the year. In twelve polls taken between July 2015 and now - four just in the last month - Hillary has led ten of them, with the other two being ties, by an average margin of +4.8.
In New Hampshire, Hillary has led in seventeen of the eighteen polls taken in the last year, the one she didn't win being a tie, by an average margin of +2.7.
Those four states carry a total of 36 electoral college votes, which would bring Hillary's total up 252 to Trump's 191.
If Hillary can carry those four states, she's 18 electoral college votes away. In addition, there's also Iowa and Nevada, two more states that Obama carried both times. Hillary has led in most of the polls in Iowa, even though Trump won the last two polls by a narrow margin. There doesn't seem to be much polling available yet for Nevada. But those are two states that Hillary should be able to win.
That's six states from which Hillary can get her total up into the 250s at least.
And that's without even talking about the big prizes of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida.
We're looking at an electoral map where Hillary can conceivably win carrying only one of those three states, while Trump would have to win all three of them and hold onto North Carolina, which we haven't talked about yet, to win.
North Carolina is a state Obama won in 2008 but lost in 2012. The transgender bathroom stuff has hurt Republicans there. There have been twenty polls there in the last year and Clinton and Trump have basically split it down the middle - nine Hillary victories, one tie, and ten Trump victories. But three of those Hillary victories were the three most recent polls, and the average margin for all the polls there is +2.0 for Hillary. It will be difficult, but NC is absolutely in play.
So Hillary is in a position where she doesn't even need the three biggest prizes as much as Trump does. Again, Trump may have to win ALL of those three states while NOT letting NC slip away.
All of this doesn't even take into consideration two wildcards that been talked about - New York and Arizona. Even here, the news is good for Hillary.
Trump people seem to think he can win NY because it's his home state, but that seems like a bit of pipe dream. She's led by double figures in all of the thirteen polls done in the last seven months, with an average margin of 18.0.
Meanwhile, the notion that Hillary could conceivably steal Arizona seems to have more credence. There's not as much polling from there, only five polls since March of this year, but Hillary led two of them and tied another, and the average margin there is currently in her favor, though it's a razor-thin +0.5.
Now, we're still three and a half months out from the election, things can change, there will be post-convention bumps, and polls will go up and down, but I just don't think the general trends are going to change all that much.
The state-polling, and thus the electoral college map, are massively in Hillary's favor, despite the national polls being close. I really think the only way she can lose is if too many of us on the left become so confident that we don't actually bother to vote ourselves. EVERYONE MUST VOTE.