Election polls 2016: trends in presidential, Senate, and House races

Hillary Clinton won more votes than Donald Trump in last month’s presidential election. But due to the magic of the Electoral College, Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States.

Yes, the November 8 “presidential election” was in actuality the venerable ritual in which the residents of Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and a few other states got the privilege of choosing the president of the United States of America.

The American public will find out whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump has won the 2016 presidential election long before the last vote is counted.

Or rather, we’ll think we know. Because as polls are closing across America, media outlets are releasing exit poll results — predicting who will win a state, and providing more information about who really turned out to vote and why.

Hillary Clinton is the favorite to win Tuesday’s presidential election. But the race has tightened of late in both national and swing state polls, and there’s been increasing chatter suggesting that Clinton’s “firewall” protecting an Electoral College majority could be in danger.

The big picture, though, is that Clinton has two broad paths toward reaching 270 electoral votes:

Donald Trump is the underdog in Tuesday’s presidential election. But he still has a shot of winning, at least if you believe the FiveThirtyEight forecast. So what would his path to Electoral College victory look like?

Essentially, the likeliest way Trump can top 270 electoral votes appears to be by:

Ghazala Khan, the mother of Gold Star Army Capt. Humayun Khan, became the center of a national controversy in July when Donald Trump suggested that, because she was Muslim, she wasn’t allowed to speak alongside her husband at the Democratic National Convention. (Which, as Ezra Klein wrote at the time, was “bullshit.”)

Khan and her husband Khizr have endured intense stereotyping and animosity as the result of their place in the spotlight during a contentious campaign — not to mention Trump insisting that their son, who died in Iraq in 2004, would still be alive today if Trump were president at the time.

On Election Day, Muslim Americans used social media to paint a picture of their values and priorities that provided a much-needed contrast to the oversimplified and often bigoted narratives that dominated the campaign cycle.

Under the hashtag #MyMuslimVote, they shared polling place selfies and images of “I Voted” stickers, accompanied with statements of hopes for what their votes would accomplish.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign contacted twice as many American voters as Donald Trump’s campaign this election cycle, according to new exit polling from Morning Consult — a symptom of the Trump campaign’s dismal attempt to salvage a lagging Republican ground game operation.

According to a survey of nearly 10,000 voters from October 18 through Election Day, 29 percent of Democrats said they were contacted by Clinton’s campaign, while only 16 percent of Republicans said they were contacted by the Trump campaign. Independents also heard from Clinton’s campaign twice as much as Trump’s campaign — 10 percent and 5 percent, respectively. Twelve percent heard from both sides of the aisle.

One of the unlikeliest heroes in the 2016 presidential election is a county judge in Nevada.

Judge Gloria J. Sturman of Clark County heard a last-minute lawsuit filed by the Trump campaign Tuesday against the county’s elections office, alleging that Clark County officials had illegally allowed polls to stay open on the last day of early voting in a mostly Latino neighborhood.

Donald Trump often threatens to sue people and doesn’t follow through. But apparently, allowing too many Latinos to vote is serious enough to justify an actual lawsuit.

Trump’s campaign sued the Clark County, Nevada registrar on Tuesday for allowing the polls to stay open on the last day of early voting (November 4) so that everyone in line could vote. The suit comes after Trump and the Nevada GOP chair both pointed to reports of a Mexican supermarket, where polls stayed open until 10 to accommodate 2-hour-long lines, as evidence that Democrats were deliberately keeping polls open to accommodate “a certain group.”

If history is anything to go by, we can expect 80 to 100 million voting-age Americans to sit out today’s presidential election.

Consider what happened in 2012. There were 241 million people of voting age, but only 130.2 million actually cast ballots in the general election — a turnout rate of just 58.6 percent. America’s turnout rate has been remarkably stable for the past 40 years, and the betting markets don’t seem to think this year will be much different.

Here’s a horrible fact: Minority voters are six times as likely as white voters to stand in line for more than an hour to vote.

Emily Badger explained the research in the New York Times:

In an early Election Day tweet, vice presidential hopeful Tim Kaine admitted that, despite his best efforts to be first in line to vote, there was one person ahead of him at the polling place this morning: a 99-year-old woman.

“Looks like I need to get used to being number two!” he mused.

We’ve been avidly following general election polls for months, and now their final verdict is in — Hillary Clinton leads Donald Trump by 3 to 4 points nationally, and leads in enough states to give her the presidency.

The only question, now, is whether they’ll be right.

Each state and Washington, DC, is allocated a share of electoral votes based on the US Census. A state’s entire share of electoral votes goes to whoever wins the most votes — except in Maine and Nebraska, where instead votes are split up based on each state’s number of congressional districts and popular vote winner.

If you’re ready to predict how the Electoral College will split in the 2016 election, you can click on each state below to toggle among Democrat, Republican, and third parties.

Hillary Clinton goes into the presidential election as the favorite to win — but the outcome of the battle for the Senate looks much less certain.

As the campaign winds down, seven races still appear to remain up for grabs. And polls are all over the place in many of them, leaving us unclear how strong Democrats’ prospects of retaking the chamber truly are.

As the candidates make their closing arguments before Election Day, millions of Americans have already cast their ballots for the presidential election.

At least 42 million citizens have voted early, with more than 18 million ballots cast in battleground states. This is a bit of a drop-off from 2012, when 46 million people voted early. Since early voting is a sign of enthusiasm for the candidates, it’s an indication that fewer voters were motivated to get to the polls early — perhaps due to the unpopularity of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

Heading into Election Day, Donald Trump has a nonzero chance of becoming president, with FiveThirtyEight’s influential model putting him at 30.5 percent. That, naturally, has many liberals freaking out: How could this guy be within striking distance of becoming president, even if he’s not favored?

It’s a fair point — Trump is a genuinely terrifying candidate. But Democrats’ freakout shouldn’t end with the presidential race. The overwhelming focus on the presidency risks drowning out other dangers the party faces, threats that have much greater odds of actually happening than a Trump win.

Sometimes history repeats itself for all the wrong reasons.

In a newsreel released by the National Archives, polling places in Alabama in 1966 were notably “swamped” by record breaking African-American and white voter turnout. Wait times were as long as four hours. Lines stretched at least three city blocks.

It’s too hard to vote in America.

That’s the takeaway from what we’ve seen over the past few days of early voting, when multiple states, including swing states like Ohio and North Carolina, have reported long — sometimes hours-long! — lines at the polls. These lines were so bad that a few people — strained for time by work, family, and other obligations — had to give up on voting early. Some of them told the Washington Post that they will go back on Election Day. But how can anyone be sure that will be the case?

This year, votes cast in Ohio may depend on the last-minute battle to thwart voter intimidation from the Trump campaign.

On Sunday, without explanation, a federal court overturned a lower court’s temporary restraining order against the Trump campaign, initially issued Friday out of concern that Donald Trump and supporters like the Stop the Steal coalition were conspiring to intimidate voters on Election Day.

People want to know who will win the election on Tuesday and are also nervous about it. Indeed, some people seem to want to be nervous about it. A trainer at my gym managed to set off a mass panic by passing on the completely inaccurate news that a poll of students at historically black colleges in Virginia found Trump leading.

The truth, however, is that by almost all accounts Hillary Clinton is leading in the polls and has been leading for essentially the entire campaign. That’s why all major election forecasters say that she is more likely than not to win. So the search for doubt has settled on Nate Silver’s forecast, an outlier among poll aggregators, that pegs Clinton as “only” a 65 percent favorite rather than the 85 percent or more she is favored by in other systems.

After all that — after all the rallies, the polls, the drama, the leaks, the 17 months of American public life we will never get back — the story of the 2016 presidential election might turn out to have been set way back in June 2015, when Donald Trump came down the escalator of Trump Tower and briefly referred to Mexican immigrants as murderers and rapists.

Latinos were listening.

Plato thought political regimes followed a predictable evolutionary course, from oligarchy to democracy to tyranny. Oligarchies give way to democracies when the elites fail, when they become spoiled, lazy, profligate, and when they develop interests apart from those they rule.

Democracies give way to tyrannies when mob passion overwhelms political wisdom and a populist autocrat seizes the masses. But the tyrant is not quite a tyrant at first. On the contrary, in a democracy the would-be tyrant offers himself as the people’s champion. He’s the ultimate simplifier, the one man who can make everything whole again.

What do the pre-election polls tell us? We’ve had some big swings: After the Democratic convention, Hillary Clinton seemed to be locking the election up, then Trump came back to a near-tie, then came a series of events — three debates, sexual assault revelations, and a war within the Republican party — which seemed to knock Trump out of the race. Then, more recently, a series of FBI leaks brought the polls back to a near-tie. Put this together, and you get the impression of a volatile electorate: Anything can happen, and all may depend on voters’ reaction to last-minute news of Chris Christie, Melania Trump, or whatever Julian Assange may have up his sleeve.

Actually, though, not many voters change their opinions during the general election campaign. This finding is borne out by my research with Sharad Goel, Doug Rivers, and David Rothschild on surveys during the 2012 campaign, Alan Abramowitz’s analysis of polls during the 2016 campaign showing a nearly perfect tracking between Clinton or Trump support in a survey and the proportion of Democrats or Republicans in the sample, and an analysis by Ben Lauderdale and Doug Rivers of surveys during the recent campaign.

When national media outlets need to know what’s going on in Nevada politics, they often turn to Las Vegas–based journalist Jon Ralston, who’s developed a strong track record of calling elections in the state.

And now that Nevada early voting has come to a close, Ralston isn’t mincing words about how he sees Donald Trump’s prospects. “Trump is dead,” Ralston tweeted Saturday. He elaborated on his blog that from the early voting numbers so far, the GOP nominee would need a “miracle” to win Nevada at this point.