Election Update: North Carolina Is Becoming A Backstop For Clinton
Hillary Clinton continues to gain ground in our presidential forecast, as it becomes clearer that last week’s debate was a turning point in the race. In fact, the polls we added to our database on Tuesday may have been Donald Trump’s worst since the debate. They included surveys showing Clinton leading Trump by 9 percentage points and 10 points in Pennsylvania, by 6 points and 2 points in North Carolina, and by 3 points in Nevada.
These polls contribute to an impressive streak for Clinton, who has trailed in just one of 25 swing state polls conducted since the debate.
Her chances of winning the election are up to 75 percent in our polls-only model, her best position since Aug. 30, and 71 percent in our polls-plus model. Those forecasts assume that Clinton currently
leads Trump by slightly more than 4 percentage points nationally, which may be on the conservative side as Clinton’s lead has tended to grow as additional post-debate polls have been added to the model.
One particular area of concern for Trump is North Carolina, where the polls we added on Tuesday were the fourth and fifth since the debate to show Clinton ahead there. They also had favorable trend lines for Clinton, with SurveyUSA showing her with a 2-point lead rather than a 4-point deficit in their early August poll, and Elon University showing her up by 6, instead of down by 1 point in their mid-September poll.
North Carolina is not a state where you want to be trailing in the polls in October, hoping for a late comeback.1 That’s because it typically has high rates of early and absentee voting. In 2012, for example, about 60 percent of ballots in North Carolina were cast before Election Day. Absentee voting is already underway there, while in-person early voting begins on Oct. 20.
Our forecast models, which don’t make any specific assumptions about early voting,2 see North Carolina as being important for another reason. Namely, because of the state’s demographics, it acts as a potential hedge for Clinton in the event of a collapse in her support among white voters without college degrees, especially in the Midwest. That’s why our models show North Carolina as the fourth-most important state, ahead of more heralded ones such as Ohio and Colorado.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/...p-for-clinton/
