It’s been a great week of polling for Hillary Clinton. In the wake of the first presidential debate, her numbers have greatly improved and her odds to win the presidency have followed. Heading into the second presidential debate this weekend, her goal is to just maintain against Donald Trump.
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FALLOUT FROM THE FIRST PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE
It was a disastrous initial debate for The Donald. Trump failed to bring up any of Clinton’s scandals while getting repeatedly embarrassed by his foibles and his numbers have plummeted since. After an initial solid 15 minutes, he was on the defensive and almost every credible survey afterward had him losing the debate.
Polling in the battleground states has echoed the results from those surveys. Only a Quinnipiac poll in Ohio, a poll that has skewed toward Trump this election, found the Republican candidate in the lead while dozens of others landed in favor of Clinton.
Those results are terrible news for the GOP at this stage of the game. We’re just a little over a month away from Election Day and Trump had almost drawn even with Clinton after being massively behind following the Democratic National Convention. Now Trump finds himself in another sizeable hole and it’s going to be very hard to dig himself out of this one.
THE CHANGING ELECTORAL MAP
Although Trump is within 5 percentage points of Clinton nationally, it’s becoming harder to piece together a winning combination of electoral votes for him. Even before the first debate, he needed to string together a decent parlay of states thanks to Clinton’s massive firewall of electoral votes.
The New York Times’ Upshot model has Clinton likely to win 254 electoral votes from 21 states and if those numbers are accurate she only needs to win 1 or 2 of the swing states in order to tip the scales in her favor. Traditional swing states like Pennsylvania and Michigan seem to be pretty solidly in Clinton’s camp and recent polling has her up by at least 5 points in Michigan and 6 points in Pennsylvania. Even though these leads aren’t insurmountable, they will be tough to overcome this late in the game.
Adding to that, Trump has become even more popular with Hispanics and that calls into question his ability to win Florida. Florida is the most important swing state with its 29 electoral votes, and it’s almost impossible to find a scenario where Trump wins the election without winning Florida. He’ll have to campaign hard in north and central Florida in order to try to turn the Sunshine State red.
THE NEXT PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE
The second presidential debate will be a town-hall format where candidates interact with the audience. This debate will be moderated by Anderson Cooper of CNN and hosted by Washington University of St. Louis.
Town halls are tricky. Attendees can flummox the candidates with questions and there’s the delicate matter of how to balance answering the question while taking care not to offend or belittle the questioner and appearing astute and presidential all the while. It’s a difficult trick to pull off and at least one of the candidates is going through live-fire to prepare themselves.
In the wake of a disastrous first debate where reports indicated that Trump spent little time preparing for the format, he has changed tack and readied himself for this one. Trump has called upon Chris Christie, someone skilled in connecting at town hall events, to advise him and will host a scaled-down town hall in New Hampshire tonight in order to prepare. It will be interesting to see how he fares in New Hampshire and whether or not he will be able to connect with individuals.
Don’t be surprised if Trump is declared the winner of the second debate. His bar is much lower than that of Clinton’s and as long as he does a decent job he will receive a lot of plaudits. However, even if he wins, barring a major gaffe from Clinton, it’s hard to see how he will get more than a slight bump of support in the days after.
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