Election 2016: Final Update!

voted

So, it turns out just enough space opened up in my schedule today for a quick lunch-time update to my 88 hours to go post from Friday. This really will be the final one though, since I’m in vendor demos all day tomorrow, and then home to watch results!

If you recall from my last post, at this stage it really is all about margins and momentum. I’ve updated the tables from that post, and on the popular vote front we find:

shift1

Extremely amusingly, despite plenty of movement in the individual components, the net effect is that each candidate went down slightly over the past three days, and they have the same net today that they did on Friday. No evidence of further last-minute movement toward Trump, and, based on these numbers, and assuming a roughly 6% third party vote and 50/50 split of the 4.5% remaining undecided, we’d end up with Clinton 48.9% to Trump 45.2%. Now, 3% is around a typical poll’s irreducible error-margin, so the end result could be higher or lower, but we can say that Clinton looks to be ahead outside any margin of error.

In the swing states that actually matter for the electoral college, we see the following (I’ve added Michigan, since a flurry of activity from both campaigns seems to indicate they think that it could be in play (or else they’re trying to fake each other out, which does happen)):

shift2

As one might expect this late in the campaign, nobody’s moved all that much- all margins are up or down within a half percent of where they were Friday. It does dispel the notion that Trump is having any kind of last-minute surge, though. Given the margin and momentum, Arizona, Georgia, Colorado, Michigan and Pennsylvania don’t really seem to be swingy, which would lead to this map:

270v1

This is about where we were on Friday- Clinton is one shy of the 270 needed, and for Trump to win he would have to take all six remaining swing states and the split electoral vote from Maine. He’s only leading in two of the six (Iowa and Ohio), and in one of the six (New Hampshire) Clinton has a steady lead with no signs of further erosion. If this holds, it would make her President, as follows:

270v2

In which case the remaining three states would be superfluous, although victory in Nevada would help pad out her map, and North Carolina or especially Florida would make it possible to experience an upset loss in one or more other states and still pull through. All-in-all, not a bad place for her to be. And early voting totals in all three states are looking very good for Clinton, especially Nevada, where a surge in Latino voters has already banked enough votes that Trump would have to beat Clinton by double-digits on election day to still take the state.

I don’t have time to do pretty graphic inserts for all our other indicators. But it doesn’t really matter, because they aren’t too different from Friday, and, crucially, not a single one favors Trump:

indicators

While Clinton’s lead in the popular vote and her probable margin in the electoral college has gone up and down, it’s worth remembering that, over the last 6 months, Trump only ever had a lead for an aggregated total of eight days:

rcp

Exactly as one would suspect from this, it is much more likely than not that Hillary Clinton will be elected the next President of the United States tomorrow.

 

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