Quote:
Originally Posted by peter12
The reality is probably that most people haven't made up their minds yet. Not surprising, given that both candidates are overwhelminginly despised by a majority of the electorate.
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I strongly disagree with this. There are a lot of people who are undecided about whether or not they'll actually vote but probably know which candidate they would vote for, and some who are undecided about whether or not to vote for a third party candidate or not, but the number of people still on the fence about Clinton vs. Trump is probably tiny. If you were undecided last week, you probably just aren't going to vote. That's why you don't see Clinton's numbers dropping much as Trump's numbers rise. This isn't about voters shifting camps at this point.
I think the latest 'scandal' motivates the Republican base in a huge way, but doesn't swing a lot of undecideds. Some reluctant Clinton voters might decide not to vote, and some reluctant Trump voters will decide to vote.
That said, ground-game is the thing that best insulates you against having reluctant voters; if there's a mass of reluctant Clinton voters and the Democrats have the ground game to know who they are, all it often takes is a phone-call reminding them of the importance of their vote. So while I don't think it's in the bag for Clinton, I do think it's still strongly in her favour. At the same time, this probably makes up for Trump's lack of ground game in a major way.
I'm going to be closely watching the early voting trends in NC as a bellweather of change this week. Democrat early voting has been great so far, but a decline in Democrat early voting compared to Republican early voting could be an important predictor.
It's important when looking at the 538 model is that it is the most aggressive of any of the forecasters in terms of trying to identify and react to trends (compare it to the NY Times model that still has Clinton at 88%). I'm not saying to discount 538's model, just keep in mind that it is specifically designed to latch on to changes in momentum like this, which right now does look like the right decision because it's moving more than other projections as a reaction to an event that intuitively 'should' move the projections.
