Florida will decide, Trump or Clinton!
A week ago, I wrote an article on how it was almost impossible for Trump to mount a comeback. Now, every expert in the United States believes that Trump has a fair chance of winning the election next week. Almost every analysis is based on a slew of recent polls that suggest a strong Trump momentum. Please read my data based article on Swarajyamag yesterday on how most of this so called momentum whether at the National level or even at the State level is really a tiny swing in favor of Trump. However, there are some interesting underlying changes in the polls that could be make the election night interesting.
I have updated my underlying analysis with data from fresh polls that I spoke about in my original article. Once again, I refer to the swings at the segment level rather than at the Polls at an overall level
The swing towards Trump appears to be coming from White Suburban Affluent voters across demographic groupsin the mid-west region irrespective of their education backgrounds. Which means that Clinton has little possibility of winning both Iowa and Ohio given the limited time.
At the moment, realclearpolitics suggests a 57 electoral vote advantage for Clinton.
However, should she lose Florida, the electoral vote would end in a tie at 268 each. She will then have to win one of Nevada, North Carolina or New Hampshire to secure the Presidency. Update: The early voting trends seem to suggest Hillary will win Nevada
As far as Trump is concerned, he could win all the battle ground States like Ohio, Iowa, Nevada, North Carolina and New Hampshire and yet end up losing if he loses Florida
Essentially, Florida will once again decide a Presidential election. As things Stand today, Hillary Clinton has a marginal advantage over Trump in Florida. However, the margin of error appears to be quite small though the range of results provided by polling firms is very wide (4 points lead for Trump to 4 points lead for Clinton) to really make sense of them. It appears that voter turnout will matter the most in Florida
On election night, in my view 4 States will matter - Florida, Nevada, North Carolina and New Hampshire. That said, the Presidency could be decided fairly early should one of the two win Florida.
Finally, as I said 4 months ago, owing to significantly higher Social media engagement, Opinion polls around the world have been wrong (including the primaries in the US) and it is possible that the final vote shares will be completely different from what opinion polls appear to be predicting today. It could be a landslide in favor of one candidate.