The Trump Apocalypse Watch is a subjective daily estimate, using a scale of one to four horsemen, of how likely it is that Donald Trump will be elected president, thus triggering an apocalypse in which we all die.
“Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning the White House are still near an all-time low in the FiveThirtyEight forecasts, although they’re up a smidge from earlier in the week,” Harry Enten wrote on Thursday. What does that mean exactly? For the numbers men and women at Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, Clinton is down to between a 58 and 59 percent chance of electoral victory. How can this be when just a little more than a month ago, Silver had Clinton’s odds at near 90 percent? Well it’s largely attributable to her Sept. nosedive in the polls, which FiveThirtyEight doesn’t believe she’s recovered from yet. “[There] isn’t yet clear evidence of a Clinton rebound,” Enten writes. “If the bulk of the polling data begins to show Clinton doing better than she was previously, her odds of winning the election will go up.”
But the FiveThirtyEight analysis was written before the release of a number of good state polls for Clinton on Thursday. While two new polls released on Wednesday have Clinton losing in North Carolina, another released on Thursday has her tied. And the Tar Heel State has in recent years just been electoral college gravy for Democrats’ trying to win the White House. Likewise, two new polls show her losing by 6 points and 7 points in Georgia—a must-win state for Trump in any scenario, but one that would only portend a landslide for Clinton if she were to win it. A new Florida poll, meanwhile, has her trailing by one point, while perhaps the most discouraging news of the day was an Iowa poll that has her down by seven in a four-way race. But Clinton doesn’t need either state to win—Florida is a big prize, but not necessary for her electoral odds. And Iowa offers just six measly electoral votes. Where does she need to win? Colorado and Virginia. And what do those polls say? Despite a nosedive, Roanoke College has Clinton winning by 7 points in the Dominion State in a four-way race and Quinnipiac likewise has her up by 6. Quinnipiac, which also published that scary Iowa poll, has Clinton up by a much tighter 2 points in Colorado. But Rocky Mountain PBS released a poll showing her up by 7 percent in a four-way contest and 9 percent in a two-way race. If she wins those two states, it’s almost certain that she wins the electoral college and the White House. Right now, in fact, Sam Wang’s Princeton Election Consortium has Clinton projected to win 293 electoral votes, well more than the 270 she needs.
Speaking of which, what do the non-Nate Silver numbers people say? As my colleague Josh Voorhees notes, the Princeton Election Consortium still gives Clinton an 80 percent chance of victory. The Upshot gives her a 73 percent chance, meanwhile. Averaging Trump’s odds across the three platforms still gives him less than a 30 percent chance of victory. All in all, that sounds like one horseman to me.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Getty Images, Wikimedia Commons
