Eleven impossible days from Election Day, and the 2016 contest is still delivering surprises. We’re learning about whole new categories of voters. “Walmart Moms” and “Sam’s Club Republicans” and “Lunch Pale Democrats” and all those other calcified coinages are being swept away, replaced with new subsets like “Alt-Right Frog Meme-Puppets.” And then there’s the one we’re seeing in polls from the second half of this week: “So Long as Donald Trump’s List of Groping Accusers Increases at a Manageable Crawl, I Guess I Could Vote for the Dude Republicans.”
Are the polls tightening? A little, and mostly because some Republicans are falling back in line. The governing dynamic of national poll fluctuations this general election has been that Clinton stays where she is, in the mid-40s, while Donald Trump jumps up and down from the high-30s to the low-40s depending on the acuity of any given day’s scandal. That’s mostly what is still happening. If Trump can keep his mouth shut and avoid outside shocks well enough through Election Day—two big ifs!—he might be able to pull off a more respectable loss, like the 4.4 percentage point deficit that the RealClearPolitics average pegs him at now. There’s just no indication that, even were he to steady himself, he’d be able to change the minds he needs to win.
Some polls are unusually good for Trump (Republic-leaning Rasmussen Reports showing a tie) while some are unusually good for Clinton (USA Today/Suffolk showing Clinton up nine). But let’s compare, say, the Fox News national poll from last week to the one from this week. Last week’s four-way poll gave Clinton a six-point margin, 45 to 39 percent. This week’s puts it at three, 44 to 41. The tracking polls from both ABC News and the Los Angeles Times/USC are both… weird… but we can still glean something from their movement. The former, which debuted earlier this week, first gave Clinton a 12-point edge. That margin has dropped to a saner four points. (Clinton dropped two points, from 50 to 48, whiled Trump gained six, from 38 to 44.) The LAT poll, meanwhile—which tends to run about six points better for Trump than the national average—has moved from a tie to a 2-point lead for Trump. Various state polls are falling back into orbit, too: Two Michigan polls Thursday gave Clinton workmanlike six- and seven-point leads; the well-respected pollsters at Monmouth University put Trump within four in New Hampshire.
You can see some of what’s going on here in Gallup’s tracker of candidate favorability ratings. Trump’s favorability among Republicans was in the high 60s in late September and early October. After the Access Hollywood tapes and various sexual assault accusations came out, it dropped to 63 or 64 percent favorability for a while. It’s now rebounded to 71 percent. Clinton’s favorability among Democrats, meanwhile, has been consistently in the high 70s over the same period.
And then there’s my favorite proxy for determining how Trump is doing among Republicans: Watching the trends of whether Republican officials are disavowing or supporting or re-supporting or re-disa-pport-avowing him. Rep. Jason Chaffetz, one of the first to withdraw his support for Trump following the Access Hollywood tape, is now (in pathetically hedged terms) back on board. Idaho Sen. Mike Crapo and Nebraska Sen. Deb Fischer, too.
What’s going on? Some partisans are coming home, as happens in the late stages of the election. Trump hasn’t egregiously erred in a while, which allows hesitant Republicans with purposefully short memories to give themselves the excuse they need to vote for their party’s nominee. Trump still is not doing nearly well enough among college-educated whites (especially women) and minorities to win a presidential election. It’s also worth noting that the election has already begun, with early voting in full swing. There may be a modest tightening, but Trump’s best shot resides in systemic polling failure—or an October surprise.
