Hate to do another calm down post but...I posted the Bloomberg article in the other thread, but here's the Trump campaign admitting they are well behind.
Quote:
Several things jump out. Despite Trump’s claim that he doesn’t believe the polls, his San Antonio research team spends $100,000 a week on surveys (apart from polls commissioned out of Trump Tower) and has sophisticated models that run daily simulations of the election. The results mirror those of the more reliable public forecasters—in other words, Trump’s staff knows he’s losing. Badly. “Nate Silver’s results have been similar to ours,” says Parscale, referring to the polling analyst and his predictions at FiveThirtyEight, “except they lag by a week or two because he’s relying on public polls.” The campaign knows who it must reach and is still executing its strategy despite the public turmoil: It’s identified 13.5 million voters in 16 battleground states whom it considers persuadable, although the number of voters shrinks daily as they make up their minds.
Trump’s team also knows where its fate will be decided. It’s built a model, the “Battleground Optimizer Path to Victory,” to weight and rank the states that the data team believes are most critical to amassing the 270 electoral votes Trump needs to win the White House. On Oct. 18 they rank as follows: Florida (“If we don’t win, we’re cooked,” says an official), Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia.
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So two things stand out, one significantly more than the other: One, they say models like 538 are mostly right, except for timing differences. They are effectively conceding their internals show much of the same external polls have showed. But the significant thing that stands out is they put Georgia on the list of states they have to win. Georgia should not even be close, so that they conceded that it is close pretty much tells you all you need to know. In the same article they also point out driving down Hillary's turnout is probably their best chance to win.