The same poll last month had Clinton with a much larger lead, with the Democrat at 49 percent, Trump at 37 and Johnson at 9 percent.
http://nypost.com/2016/08/10/poll-shows-trump-gaining-on-clinton/

See what happens when *I* cherry pick polls??

My poll "proves" your poll is BS... :D

Cherry picked polls don't "prove" jack...

Michale

You see, that's the difference between ya'all and myself..

I look at things realistically, factually and without any partisan or ideological bias and I acknowledge that BOTH candidates have approval number issues...

Ya'all just knock Trump for his approval numbers and blatantly ignore the fact that Hillary's approval numbers are almost as bad as Trumps...

That's the difference that makes ALL the difference...

Michale

Trump could actually say something that will actually cause his poll numbers to drop and him to lose supporters..

Hillary could actually be caught dead to rights doing something really REALLY nefarious....

What ya'all just can't seem to grasp (or, REFUSE to grasp is more likely) is that this is an election unlike any other. Conventional wisdom, for all it's "accuracy", ain't no better than throwing darts at a dart board...

Michale

Meanwhile, the latest cherry picked polls now show Hillary Clinton ahead.....

There... Fixed it for you..

Yer welcome. :D

Michale

"And more Trump voters are born.... :D"

Keep telling yourself that. Meanwhile, the latest polls now show Hillary Clinton ahead of and leading Trump in deep red South Carolina of all places, and she is within striking distance of Trump even in Kansas, a state Trump should be currently winning hands down.

You DO realize that you have put yourself in the EXACT same seat as those Republicans who were so anti-Obama sit in, right??

Thereby once again proving that there really is no difference between ya'all and the Republicans you castigate... :D

Michale

Do exactly what the hysterical Demcorat Party slave tells you to do!!

There... Fixed it for you... :D

You're welcome... :D

Michale

Where is the Republican Establishment, notably office holders, and donors. Where is their courage? The only honorable position is:

Denounce Trump as a fascist
Withdraw support
Announce they will work with Democrats to impeach Trump should he be elected by some miracle

Want to be a patriot?. Here's your chance Gumby, act now. Not many genuine patriotic moments come your way.

My apparently spineless GOP congressman and senator are getting an email to this effect.

Time to take out the trash!!!!!!

So much for ya'all's claims that it was the Russians who hacked the DNC....

Assange hints that it was a DNC staffer who gave the emails to WikiLeaks...

A DNC staffer who was murdered under very suspicious circumstances, right before he was go to the FBI....

Dead bodies follow Hillary Clinton where ever she goes.....

Michale

And more Trump voters are born.... :D

Michale

Point to Michale.. :D

Michale

Thank you.

You are accusing the HRC campaign of lying in their official statement?

"Honorary" is not some term I made up. It's in the fricking official statement if you bothered to read it. Sheesh! What other "facts" do you want to make up about this?

See how easy I am!?? :D heh

Michale

I'll accept that as well.. :D

Michale

Heh. Too easy...

Nope.. Not easy at all..

Because we're not talking about the EFFECT that Duke had on the Trump campaign..

At least *I* am not..

We're talking about the effect the Duke thing HAD ON YA'ALL....

And, since the circumstances are quite similar, logic dictates that ya'all should have the SAME reaction against Hillary over her Taliban/God-Will-Punish-Gays admirer that ya'all had against Trump over David Duke...

If ya'all DON'T have the same reaction, then it's clear that the '-D' after Hillary's name makes ALL the difference.. The ONLY difference..

Simple logic...

NOW do ya care to comment?? :D

Michale

I love it when you tee up my response like that... heh.

OK, by your logic, DID the David Duke thing kill Trump? No? So why do you expect differently now?

Heh. Too easy...

-CW

HILLARY CLINTON IGNORES REPORTER’S QUESTIONS ABOUT FATHER OF ORLANDO SHOOTER ATTENDING HER RALLY
http://ntknetwork.com/hillary-clinton-ignores-reporters-questions-about-father-of-orlando-shooter-attending-her-rally/

Hillary's David Duke moment..

Surely ya'all agree since ya'all were ALL OVER the David Duke/Donald Trump issue, right???

Anything less is nothing but blatant hypocrisy... :D

Michale

And STILL no comment from ya'all over all the violence and attacks committed against Trump supporters??

Strange.. Ya'all were so vocally against violence when ya tried to paint Trump and his supporters as advocating violence..

Now that we're seeing ACTUAL violence against Trump protesters??

All of the sudden, ya'all lost yer voices...

Funny, iddn't it??

Nope.. Not funny.. Just sad.... :^/

Michale

I am looking at the health facts coming thru and the fact that the Orlando scumbag's father is a big Hillary fan..

Ya'all figured that the David Duke fiasco would sink Trump...

Shouldn't the same apply to Hillary and his Taliban/God-Will-Punish-Gays admirer??

:D

As for the electoral math, well, Trump's looking worse than Romney, about where McCain was in the last month of the campaign -- not a fun place to be in.

As you say, it's only August.. Plenty of time for Hillary to keel over from a heart attack or be caught in bed with Osama Bin Laden's ex-wife.. :D

Michale

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/clinton-campaign-to-devote-more-money-workers-to-arizona-georgia/2016/08/09/46150062-5e2e-11e6-8e45-477372e89d78_story.html

Clinton pushes into AZ and GA. Probably a good idea, at this point.

:-)

-CW

MT doesn't have any polling yet, so I could put it in any category, really. The states move around as time goes by -- each future EM column will detail which states have moved which directions, and why. I even considered making Arkansas a tossup state earlier this year (because of the Clinton ties), but haven't seen much evidence of it yet.

Today, UT firmed up for Trump, but take a look at GA (on the E-V.com site). As I said in the article, it's fun to watch the states move around, but only by graphing the results over time do you get a picture of the whole race.

TheStig [27] -

Charlie Sheen and Donald Trump seem awfully similar, 'tis true. All that "winning!" stuff, especially...

Michale -

Which polls are you looking at? Even the LA Times (outlier towards GOP consistently) now has Hillary up...

As for the electoral math, well, Trump's looking worse than Romney, about where McCain was in the last month of the campaign -- not a fun place to be in.

But hey, it's only August, I'm sure Trump will turn things around by his calm demeanor and steady hand on the tiller, right?

-CW

Father of Orlando shooter spotted behind Clinton at rally..
Will Hillary Disavow Father's Endorsement? Campaign has NO COMMENT
http://nypost.com/2016/08/09/father-of-orlando-shooter-spotted-behind-clinton-at-rally/

Cue cries from the Weigantia Peanut Gallery...

"Well... That's different..."

:D

Michale

Despite ALL the facts to the contrary.. :D

Michale

Michale

And the 56th... 57th??? TRUMP IS TOAST prediction.. :D

Michale

Exactly...

Ya'all made great hay about those scumbags who support Trump..

NOW ya don't like it when *I* use the same criteria???

or perhaps we should NOT judge the candidates based the worst people who support them.

That's been my position all along..

I only changed when ya'all changed the rules..

If ya'all want to agree that the character of supporters DOES NOT indicate the character of the candidate, then I am more than willing to agree..

But ya'all can't have it both ways....

Michale

How is the Trump psyche going to react to housed in the skull of an increasingly obvious Looozer? The whole carnival act was based on winning. Maybe a consult with ex-winner Charlie Sheen (regarding coping skills) is in order.

No, I am not complacent. Keep knocking him to the curb I say. Trump would do the same.

you want to judge the candidates by who supports them? personally i don't think it's right to judge donald by the support he gets from Rocky Suhayda of the american nazi party and david duke of the kkk. but if that's where you want to go, by all means open up that can of worms - i don't think your guy stacks up very well.

or perhaps we should NOT judge the candidates based the worst people who support them.

JL

He supports the Taliban....

He is quoted as saying that god will punish gays...

He is the father of the Orlando scumbag who gunned down over a hundred innocent people

And he is a Hillary supporter...

The ads just write themselves..

Michale

Of course, you don't mention the tens of millions that Gulf states have funneled into Hillary's campaign..

Plus you fail to mention that Hillary has tons more connections to Russians and their money than Trump does...

"It's not illegal when a Democrat does it.."

:^/

Michale

Hillary Clinton

The candidate for scumbag terrorists and their families.. :^/

Michale

DWS is a major fund-raiser, which Clinton couldn't afford to lose, so I am not sure how "honorary" that position really is.

I read this morning where different members of foreign governments have reported receiving solicitations for donations from Trump's campaign. I guess his Russian campaign team forgot that it was illegal for him to do that.

SHOCKING!!!! :D

Michale

Occasionally, even HuffPoop gets it right.. :D

Especially when they completely agree with me.. :D heh

Michale

1) Meta modeling using polling data and historically based fundamentals:

The Upshot (TU)
538
PredictWise (PW)

2) Curve fitted, aggregated polling data:

Real Clear Politics
Huffpollster

3) Prediction Markets

Betfair
PredictIt
Princeton Election Consortium (PEC)

4) Expert Opinion (Electoral equiv. of Wine Tasting)

CW.com (excellent graphics!!!!)
Sabato Report
Rothenberg and Gonzoles

Note: Due to the large "Thumb on the Scales" AKA Electoral College, TheStig puts great emphasis on quantitative estimates of a candidate winning each state's electoral Quatloos. These probabilities are filtered thru 2 home brew models (Stig written in MS Excel as a sanity check of the stated probabilities of any candidate winning the election).

Home brew model 1: A simple Quick and Dirty model.
Rank order the probabilities of Clinton (or Trump, it matters not) winning in each state, the estimated probability of winning the election is the probability of the state bringing the electoral count up to or over 270. This model assumes all states behave independently. Which is probably not exactly true.

Home brew model 2): A random simulation model which breaks variance into state and national components. The national component factors in a wave election effect that applies uniformly to all 50 states and DC.

The Quick and Dirty model takes little time to compute, but tends to be a bit biased towards the Democrats because it assumes all model variance is National. Model Two suggest this bias is about 5% in favor of Clinton this year-except relative to the PW state probabilities, where the Quick and Dirty bias is about 10%. These biases were less in 2012, and may well go down as better state polls become available (less critical/competitive states tend to have no polling yet).

Shout out to The Upshot. Pretty close to one stop shopping for TheStig. It appears to operate outside the outside the NYT paywall.

Bottom line: Everything in this mix indicates Clinton is a heavy favorite AT THIS POINT IN TIME. Quantitative measures suggest Clinton has roughly a 75% chance of winning the White House.

The qualitative models are calling too many toss-ups. A toss up is not the same as overlap between margins of error.

On the other hand, playing my own Devil's Advocate here..

If Hillary croaks and a new Dem Candidate is put in play, it would likely INCREASE the Demcorat Party's chance of winning.. :D

Michale

"And if my grandmother had wheels, she'de be a wagon."
-Scotty

:D

And if Hillary collapses and croaks (which is looking like a distinct possibility) then NONE of it will be in play.. :D

I'm just sayin'... :D

Michale

Well that maybe not be YOUR point.. But it's the point of the whole debacle..

:D

Michale

It's kind of hard to take your word that you aren't a Democrat when all you do is hammer on Republicans and leave your precious Hussein Odumbo un-scathed..

At least I cap on the GOP when it's deserved.. Like the time I compared Rice Preemmie to Pinocchio.. Ahhhh fun times.. :D

My Party agnosticity is well documented.. I have never seen you take any Democrat to task for anything..

The facts are clear..

Michale

HRC has at least 16 people currently holding exactly the same honorary position. None of these people work for or with her campaign in any capacity whatsoever. It is just a form of thank you or, in DWS's case, a means to pacify her so she didn't cause any kind of disruption at the convention. I'm told by a former Obama campaign aid that he had at least 24 such honorary positions in 2012. it isn't something that is widely known because it is a personal thing between the candidate and the honoree.

Regardless of whether or not it's a paid position or an honorary one, the simple fact is, Hillary honored/hired DWS even though DWS did a truly despicable thing...

THAT's the point...

Michale

Whoops! Thanks for pointing it out -- the 2008 link has been fixed now. I goofed by just clicking on my own subject link (in the list on the left of all CW.com pages) for "2008 Electoral Math" and selecting the top article... which is the final 2012 article (which mentions the 2008 EM series). In other words, just plain sloppiness on my part. Mea culpa!

Good point, too, about the timing of the conventions...

-CW

Incidentally, a correction from yesterday's column which stated that Clinton had hired DWS. This is emphatically not the case and I'm surprised that this site would repeat it as though it was.

To be "hired" is to be "employed" which involves payment. The position Clinton "bestowed" on DWS was purely an honorary one.

HRC has at least 16 people currently holding exactly the same honorary position. None of these people work for or with her campaign in any capacity whatsoever. It is just a form of thank you or, in DWS's case, a means to pacify her so she didn't cause any kind of disruption at the convention. I'm told by a former Obama campaign aid that he had at least 24 such honorary positions in 2012. it isn't something that is widely known because it is a personal thing between the candidate and the honoree.

-CW

Woo hoo! I found a site which easily does maps you can download as an image file too, so the map feature is new this time around...

:-)

-CW

The lack of wonkiness has been rectified. Enjoy!

E-V.com (for some reason) waited until the conventions started before posting data this year. I guess it's understandable, the early polling is pretty laughable some times. But that's the real reason why the column series is starting later than normal this year...

-CW

LET THE GAMES BEGIN

I've really been looking forward to this feature.