It seems we
may have jumped the gun a bit in declaring the end of the Trend. Clinton now
leads in the RCP average by just .9% 44.9% to 44%. This is down from 3 points
last week. In the four-way race, it is even a touch closer at .7% with Clinton
at 41% and Trump at 40.3%. However one
thing to note particularly in the two-way race is how much the LA Times panel
poll is playing a role in the average. This
poll has Trump up 7. It is different from other polls in that it is talking to
the same voters throughout the entire stretch of the election. Trump only leads on one of the other surveys
and only by a point. If instead of just trusting RCP on its inclusion, let’s
lop off this LA Times outlier as well as excluding Clinton’s best poll. That would grow the average lead back up to
1.6%. We will need a careful look back
to see if this sort of averaging would have come closer to the mark in 2012 or
2008. We also might need to dig deeper into state polling
as we are starting to see places where state and national polls diverge without
a clear explanation. Still even with
these potential caveats, there is no denying that a very close race has broken
out with one week to go before the first debate. We will get more in depth in a later post on
how the race got so close, but for now it is just a very close race.
The Scorecard
The Scorecard is a political strategy and analysis blog. Our hope is to provide information and insight that can be found nowhere else into how and why things are happening in American politics. Unlike many political pundits, we will tell you who we think is going to win as an election approaches; we will tell you why; and we will give you a sense of our level of confidence. Ours is a holistic approach, one that takes in as many numbers as possible but is also willing to look past the numbers if need be. When we turn out to have been wrong, we will let you know. When we are right, we’ll let you know that too.
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About Me
Author Jason Paul is a longtime political operative who got his start as an intern in 2002. He has been a political forecaster for almost as long. He won the 2006 Swing State Project election prediction contest and has won two other local contests. He had the pulse of Obama-Clinton race in 2008 and has been as good as anyone at delegate math in the 2016 race. He looks forwards to providing quality coverage for the remainder of the 2016 race.
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