What do you think Drumpf's "floor" is in the popular vote percentage?

[Ken Burch]

In 2012, Romney did nothing but screw up after Labor Day, but he still took(ironically) 47%. I think he'd have held that vote share if he'd been caught in a compromising position with a teacup Chihuahua.

What would folks here guess is the base vote share The Great Hairball can count on no matter what?

[dubyadiprecession]

1. 44% is his highwater mark, i don't believe he will do any better than that.

[GreydeeThos]

2. Trump will be calling it a victory if he gets 39%

A full 10% of the Republican voters will either sit out the election or <gasp!> vote for Hillary.

[beachbumbob]

3. 42% trump, 53% Clinton...5% others..

Clinton 380 electoral votes, net 7 senate seats, net 30 house seats

Conservatives lose big

[creon]

4. 45%

45% - I think that Trump will get about 45%

[DemocratSinceBirth]

5. Any major party candidate's absolute floor is 40%, presuming he or she doesn't kill anybody.

[wildeyed]

6. Guessing 45% too.

Using the flip-o-matic, I increased percentage and turnout for non-college whites, decreased percentage for everyone else's and that is what I came up with.

http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-swing-the-election/

[KingCharlemagne]

7. The 26% who still approved of W in January, 2009 - nt

[bettyellen]

8. 38

[CobaltBlue]

9. Focus first on the combined two-party vote…

Since 2000, the combined two-party vote has been between 96.25 and 99.00 percent.

There has been noise lately that candidates outside the two major parties will actually get more than two percent each. (That is, Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Jill Stein.)

1992 and 1996 presidential elections saw the combined R-and-D voted total 80.5 and then about 89/90 percent. That was why Bill Clinton won pluralities.

It’s actually better to focus on the percentage-points margin in the U.S. Popular Vote.

In 2012, Barack Obama was re-elected by D+3.86. (Go ahead and call it D+4.)

I think this election is going to have a dramatic national shift. Elections which are modest—say, 2.50 to 5.00—tend to happen with an incumbent president wins re-election. For presidential elections, and this is applicable here in 2016, following a term-limited incumbent tend to produce a national shift beyond 6 percentage points. A lot of them are closer to 8 to 10 percentage points. The national shifts in 2000 (term-limited Bill Clinton) and 2008 (term-limited George W. Bush) were 8 and 10 percentage points.

This suggests Donald Trump wins a Republican pickup by +4 to +6 or Hillary Clinton wins a Democratic hold between +12 to +14 percentage points in the margin of the U.S. Popular Vote.