I’d recommend everybody bear in mind the dynamic we’ve discussed several times recently, which is that the presidential race has with a fair consistency oscillated between a substantial Clinton lead and a minuscule Clinton lead (ref the ‘Clinton Wall’). That said, we seem to be back in the Trump fall off part of the cycle. The TPM Electoral Scoreboard stands at Clinton 302, Trump 203, where it’s been for the last couple days. But within those numbers, over the last 48 hours we’ve gotten a range of quality state polls taken after Monday night’s debate. And they’re uniformly bad for Trump.
We have polls from New Hampshire, Michigan, Virginia and Colorado showing Clinton firming up leads she already had. One poll showing a modest Clinton lead in North Carolina has pushed that state back into the Toss Up category. But the real electoral college move is in Florida where we now have two polls, one top tier, showing Clinton reestablishing a modest lead.
This is the Florida trend chart going back to May …
There are several paths for Clinton to win without Florida. But it’s probably fair to say that Trump cannot win without Florida.
Particularly notable, for the first time since August or even July, we have a premium live phone poll out today showing Clinton in a clear lead in Nevada.
For the moment we don’t have a lot of quality data for the national race post-debate. The PollTracker Average currently stands at a 3.9 percentage point margin for Clinton. But the current average is being driven by a Rasmussen poll and a Gravis Marketing poll sponsored by Breitbart. Both show modest Clinton leads despite having what might be generously called strong GOP house effects. PPP has Clinton with a four point margin.
