Donald Trump is just one state short of the presidency, according to the 6 pm Thursday evening projection by Nate Silver, the left’s favorite polling prognosticator.
So Breitbart News is providing a guide to the 10 states most likely to give Trump his 270th Electoral Vote, and the keys to the Oval Office.
- New Hampshire – While Silver says Clinton is the slight favorite in this state, Trump leads or is tied in all three polls released in the first three days of November, including the Boston Globe, ARG and WBUR.
- Colorado – The Denver Post is the only poll showing Trump tied with Clinton — but he is within six points or less in every other recent poll. RealClearPolitics showed Trump improving from eight points down to just three, which is one of his biggest gains.
- Pennsylvania – Gravis is the only Pennsylvania poll in which Trump is within a point, but Trump’s improvement in the RealClearPolitics average from a double-digit deficit in late August, to 8.3 point deficit October 15, and then to the current 3 point deficit gives supporters hope.
- Michigan – The only poll in the past week was a Nov. 2 Fox 2 Detroit tracking poll which showed Trump pulling within three points, a big improvement over the previous polls released October 25 and 26 both showed a 7-point Clinton lead. On Nov. 3, the Fox 2 Detroit updated tracking poll showed him staying just three points behind. A Oct. 29 to Oct. 30 poll of 500 likely voters by a GOP polling firm put Trump just one point behind Clinton.
- Wisconsin – All recent polls, including the “gold standard” Marquette Law School poll, show Trump pulling to within four to six points. The fact that Sen. Ron Johnson has pulled back to within a single point in the Marquette poll, and that Wisconsin is the home state of Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, do ensure a huge local turnout effort. In addition, the voter identification law in Wisconsin is probably the best voter integrity system in the country.
- Virginia – While no longer down by double digits, all four polls released October 30 showed Trump still four to six points behind – with Emerson showing a 4-point Clinton lead in the increasingly diverse state.
- Minnesota – The two last October polls posted by the Star-Tribune showed Clinton with an 8-point lead and a 10-point lead, so Trump’s partisans are hoping there’s a huge bloc of silent supporters. They are pointing to Trump’s stunning win among the first true statewide poll of high school students as evidence of this hidden support.
- New Mexico – While Silver considers this quite a long shot, the only poll run in the last month gave Clinton just a 5-point lead, and that was before her numbers dropped as the FBI reopened its investigation of her email network.
- Oregon – The most recent poll was released Nov. 1, by Fox 12 showing a 7-point lead for Clinton, and the other polls also show similar leads for Clinton.
- New Jersey – The four polls run since Labor Day range from a 4-point to 24-point margin for Clinton – with the only October poll (Fairleigh Dickinson) being in between those at 11 points. Only the wild inconsistency of those polls gives any hope of a shocker here, which is most likely to be a double-digit Clinton win.
Winning any of those 10 states is enough to give Trump the White House, according to Silver’s graph as of 6 p.m. Thursday, if Trump doesn’t lose any of the various states which Silver believes will support Trump.
That list of pro-Trump states includes three states where Trump has a tiny or narrow edge, according to Silver. Those three states are Nevada, North Carolina and Florida.
The current polling shows that Trump has the momentum, his TV commercials are new, and they are reaching voters who normally watch only some combination of CNN, MSNBC, sports or the big networks. Clinton was clearly caught off guard by the Trump surge and did not have attack commercials produced – so she has had to resort to rerunning dated attack commercials which traditionally have diminishing returns.
Trump also benefits by early voting indicators that black turnout is dropping off from the historic highs. If North Carolina’s low-turnout numbers translate into lower black turnout, Trump could perform almost three points better than Gov. Mitt Romney’s overall percentage in 2012.
Finally, Trump hopes for the silent vote summed up by a Virginia sign stating, “Vote Trump – Nobody Ever Has to Know.”
Clinton’s advantages include the incredible targeted lists and huge ground game advantage, as well as the fact that so far she seems to only temporarily drop into a tie vote after a round of terrible news cycles and then she rebounds to a lead within a few days.
Democrats misunderstand how big that advantage is however. Democrat turnout operations can only be successful with a mass infrastructure because urban-based voters often need transportation to the polls. Most Republicans drive themselves to the polls, and do not accept rides to the polls, so GOP consultants have long joked that party’s get-out-the-vote program was called “television.”
This time, the massive digital effort by Trump’s data guru, Brad Parscale, could become an effective turnout tool.