Trump cheats at golf - the ONE and ONLY politics thread

Good, Ty. I didn't necessarily, but you're the person he was responding to.

 

I'm backing Dick Whitman in this race.

 

I hope to God I am wrong. YF's horse race posts this week struck me as very familiar, and I finally figured out why. They were the same basic things I was telling myself about John Kerry down the stretch in 2004. That too was a damn close election. But all in all, better to be nursing an uncomfortable lead down the stretch than putting on one's rally cap.

 

@Amy ... hands down.

 

We did Colorado a couple of pages ago. Obama +5, the voting is half done and Clinton is tracking several points ahead of Obama's 2012 pace in early voting.

Nevada was +6.6 for Obama. More than 60% of the expected vote total is already cast. Clinton is even or slightly ahead of Obama's pace.

In order to win these states, Trump would have to beat Romney by 6 and 7 points respectively. That would be equal to him winning the national vote by 2-3 points. But that is only if none of the votes had already been cast. With the lead already banked, the remaining votes would have to pile up for Trump at a rate that would reflect him having a double-digit national lead. We both know that Clinton could confess to murdering Vince Foster to cover up her secret Muslim heritage and that still wouldn't happen.

Those states are indisputably, mathematically gone for Trump. But Silver's model gives Colorado to Trump 30% of the time and Nevada 50% of the time.

Any Trump victory scenario that involves him winning either of those states can be rejected out of hand.

What scenarios does that leave where he wins? There is only one.

First, he has to win Florida, where Clinton has held narrow leads in 6 of the last 8 unaligned polls (her best of the bunch coming today, entirely post-Comey) and where she has an early lead in early voting.

Then he has to also win North Carolina, where he has led only one of the last 23 unaligned polls and which also has early voting to blunt the effectiveness of any late surge.

And then even if he pulls those two off, he still loses unless he picks off one of the upper Midwest blue states: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania or Michigan. Her RCP leads in those states are 6.2, 3.8 and 5.4. RCP does not list a single poll showing him leading any of them in the last 10 weeks.

This is a football game where the Patriots are up 16 with 90 seconds left, and the Browns just threw a 60-yard completion to get into the red zone. Their fans are frantically trying to come up with scenarios where they score, get the 2-point conversion, get the onside kick, convert again, then win in overtime. It may be more likely than it was before that big play, and they have a good chance to make the score closer than it looked like it might be, but they aren't actually going to win.

 

Series of very close New Hampshire polls today (Trump up one, tied) probably bring Clinton's 538 win percentage down to 60 percent by late night. Look, Trump has to win both NC and Florida to win. But he could. He could end up with 270-275 electoral votes. Easy.

 

You literally just ignored everything I said.

Trump's current states plus NC and Florida and New Hampshire *is still losing*

 

http://www.270towin.com/maps/9BJkk

People really don't seem to get this because the media is obsessed with reporting states on Trump's side of the tipping point as "battlegrounds"

As already noted, early voting have already put Colorado and Nevada in Clinton's column.

The remaining battlegrounds are Iowa, Ohio, Florida, New Hampshire, Maine CD-2, and North Carolina, right?

A Trump sweep of all of those still leaves him losing 274-264.

He needs to sweep every battleground and win a state that is bluer than the national average by 2-3 points.

 

On betting sites Herself's winner-take-all contract trades at around 60%, and that's after a pretty precipitous drop (which is oversold, I suspect). To put that in NFL terms, right now she's akin to a 3- to 3.5-point favorite ... but I don't think the correspondence is all that clean. Her chances are stronger than that.

 

Plus 1 from Maine gets him to 269.

 

No, it doesn't. Look at the map I posted. I was including the Maine CD. He still only gets to 264 without PA, WI, or MI