Marist: Clinton +14

[pbrower2a]

Right now - Trump is ahead of Truman - Truman was down 13 by the 20th of August. Truman would narrow that to 6 by the last week of September.

HW Bush had recovered to 7 by August 15th.

Dubya was down by 10 by September 20th.

We'll know pretty quick where Trump stands. His campaign is in terrible historical shape. He has 2 weeks to shape up.

Big differences:

1. People did not understand how polls worked. Those were national polls, far more relevant than when America did not have the polarization that it had when Obama was running. We now pay attention to statewide polling.

2. Donald Trump is not Harry Truman. Truman had years of service in the military (he was a colonel) and in elective office. Truman was a problem solver as a politician, and he used that combination to get elected in 1948. He also faced an opponent who  had serious weaknesses as a campaigner. Donald Trump insults huge swaths of the American public and gets into trouble for that.

3. Hillary Clinton now owns the successes of a President that the other Party has grossly underestimated. If anything, Hillary Clinton is riding the Obama legacy while having the formidable Obama campaign apparatus intact. She owns Obama successes and failures in foreign policy -- which is lots of successes and few failures. Obama foreign policy  little differs from what Ronald Reagan got away with, which one can best describe as 'effective'.

Does this sound familiar? Obama as Reagan and Hillary Clinton as George Herbert Walker Bush is a fair analogy. Donald Trump is running on his questioned reputation of business acumen. 

It's the Obama apparatus/Clinton campaign that will be running the equivalent of the "Willie Horton" ads this year. 

[pbrower2a]

Going only on polls from after the Conventions... if Hillary Clinton is up 10% in Michigan and Pennsylvania, then she is almost certainly winning Ohio.

I have seen relatively few post-Convention polls -- one in Arizona (Obama has a slight lead), one in Nevada (very slight lead, but the pollster is Rasmussen), two each in Pennsylvania and Michigan, one in Florida, one in Mew Hampshire, and three in Georgia.

We are going to see polls from other states that get polled often. Some are unlikely to offer surprises (California, Connecticut, and New York) because they are California, Connecticut, and New York. PPP gives us almost an excess of information on North Carolina. It's about time for a Selzer poll of Iowa and a Marquette University Law School poll of Wisconsin. For obvious reasons, Colorado, Ohio and Virginia get polled often. We have seen some surprising polls in Utah and can expect more.      

My current map, which takes some convention-time polls of Alabama, Kentucky, Oklahoma and Tennessee, states that get polled little, shows Hillary Clinton losing those states. I so far have nothing but bad news for anyone who still thinks that Donald Trump can win the Presidency. National tracking pols show Hillary Clinton up by high single digits or low double digits.  

How does she lose Colorado if Arizona is close? How does she lose Ohio or Virginia if she has huge leads in Michigan and Pennsylvania and an unusually-strong lead in Florida?  But such is guesswork on my part based on quantitative results in a few states and an overpowering lead in national tracking polls.

Now for what I can't measure -- the Republican Party has severe rifts that will hurt its electoral campaigns. Donald Trump is running an execrable, mean-spirited campaign when such is not becoming more amenable to political success. If Donald Trump is doing well among under-educated white voters, he is getting crushed by ethnic and religious minorities. He could lose educated white voters, something unheard-of for any Republican since Goldwater, at the least!

There is much that I do not know about the shape of this Presidential campaign. I simply can't say anything good about the chances of Donald Trump in what I don't know.