2016 Election Predictions: Latest Polls Show Hillary Clinton Losing Her Lead And New Potential Path To Victory For Donald Trump
The 2016 presidential election predictions are growing a bit more cloudy with the latest polls showing Donald Trump closing what was once seen as an insurmountable deficit and starting to build some potential paths to victory against Hillary Clinton.
In recent weeks, it looked as if Clinton would run away with the race as she built a large national lead and pulled ahead in a series of key swing states. Trump suffered through a dismal October as he was hit first by the release of the Access Hollywood video that appeared to show him bragging about sexually assaulting women and then by a series of accusers claiming Trump had acted in a sexually inappropriate way, some claiming he assaulted them.
But Hillary Clinton was the one taking a hit at the very end of the month with the FBI on Friday telling lawmakers that it was reviewing new evidence in Clinton’s email investigation. It brought her scandal, once believed to be buried in the summer when the FBI announced it would not be filing charges against Clinton for her unauthorized use of a private email server, back to the forefront.
The latest 2016 election polls now show Trump making up the ground he had lost. Clinton’s lead, which reached double digits in a number of polls, have been slashed down to close to 2 or 3 in a series of polls. The poll aggregator, Real Clear Politics, even shows Donald Trump in the lead in four-way polls that include Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein.
An article from the poll aggregation and analysis site, Fivethirtyeight, shows that if he were to lose by somewhere between 3 and 5 points nationally, Donald Trump would likely have no path to victory. In this scenario, Clinton would hold on to win most swing states, including Ohio, Florida, Nevada, Colorado, and North Carolina.
But the 2016 election prediction changes drastically if Donald Trump can pull to within 1 point of Hillary Clinton, the site found. This would change the map considerably, making toss-ups of states that would be currently seen as safe for Clinton.
“This isn’t a secure map for Clinton at all. In a race where the popular vote is roughly tied nationally, Colorado and New Hampshire are toss-ups, and Clinton’s chances are only 60 to 65 percent in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania,” the report noted. “She has quite a gauntlet to run through to hold her firewall, and she doesn’t have a lot of good backup options. While she could still hold on to Nevada, it doesn’t have enough electoral votes to make up for the loss of Michigan or Pennsylvania.”
The early voting that has taken place for nearly two weeks now has also added to the 2016 election predictions, although the results have been a bit of a mixed bag. Hillary Clinton had received strong early voting results from states like North Carolina, but there are also some troubling signs for the Democratic Party candidate.
There has been a drop in African-American turnout in 2016 early voting compared to 2012, CNN noted. This is a key demographic for Hillary Clinton and could hurt her on Election Day if the turnout remains low.
But CNN noted that the latest early voting numbers show that other key Clinton demographics are on the upswing.
“More Latino voters, however, are among the more than 24.4 million American voters who have already cast their ballots — including 12.4 million in battleground states — according to a CNN analysis of the latest early voting numbers,” the report noted.
The 2016 general election predictions will become clearer in the next week as the latest polls show whether Donald Trump’s momentum is real or just a side effect of Hillary Clinton’s FBI investigation being brought back into the news.
[Featured Image by Ralph Freso/Getty Images]
