Election Update: The Craziest End To The 2016 Campaign Runs Through New Mexico
This weekend was a letdown for those of us hoping for new, high-quality national polls to test how last week’s debate affected the campaign. The only new national polls we received were updates to the USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times and UPI/CVoter tracking polls, both of which have actually moved slightly toward Donald Trump, but they still contain a mix of pre-debate and post-debate data. Meanwhile, an ABC News/Washington Post poll showed Hillary Clinton expanding her favorability rating gap with Trump — her numbers are bad, but his numbers are worse. But that poll apparently didn’t actually ask respondents who they were voting for.
So forecast-wise, we’re in the same place that we were on Friday: It’s pretty clear that the debate helped Clinton, but there’s some doubt about the magnitude of her bounce. It’s plausible that she’s gained only 1 or 2 percentage points, increasing her lead over Trump to about 3 points overall. That’s what our models have accounted for so far, enough to make her a 67 percent favorite according to our polls-only forecast and a 64 percent favorite according to polls-plus. Or her bounce could prove to be larger than that, especially given that Trump has woken up to — or stayed up all night tweeting about — a host of bad stories in the week since the debate.
There was one poll that caught our eye, though, and it was from New Mexico. The survey, from Research & Polling Inc. for the Albuquerque Journal, showed a competitive three-way matchup, with Clinton at 35 percent, Trump at 31 percent, and former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson at 24 percent. Because New Mexico hasn’t been polled much, the survey had a fair amount of influence on our forecast, reducing Clinton’s chances of winning New Mexico to 82 percent from 85 percent in the polls-only model.
Most of the time, Trump would be the beneficiary of a Clinton loss in New Mexico. But the model also assigns Johnson, the Libertarian Party’s presidential nominee, an outside chance — 2 or 3 percent — of winning the state. That could lead to an Electoral College deadlock that looks like this:
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http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-the-craziest-end-to-the-2016-campaign-runs-through-new-mexico/
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