FL-AIF: Clinton significantly leads Trump and Cruz

[pbrower2a]

In this election, Georgia is a D+9 state and Florida is a D+15 relative to the national average.

#Rasmussen

I thought this was supposed to happen within the coming decades and not this cycle! Wow...

As a side question, when do general election polls start mattering more? Are we already within that window?

The States elect the President; the People don't. I look at the state-by state maps and I see few ways for Republicans to pick up states that they haven't won since the 1980s.

Republicans have been losing Hispanics with their crass anti-intellectualism. It is one thing to criticize an eccentric college professor or wayward writer; it is another to reject intellectual achievement altogether. Republican contempt even for science ensures that such people as schoolteachers and accountants can hold Republican pols in contempt. Schoolteachers and accountants are among the largest occupational groups in America.

It could just be that Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are the two worst matches that the Republicans have had for America since Barry Goldwater. Goldwater simply scared Americans with his bellicose rhetoric about the Soviet Union. Trump and Cruz attack what many Americans are and what they dream. Either one of them would make American liberals wax nostalgic -- about Ronald Reagan.

[pbrower2a]

A "comfortable" lead for Democrats in a state that has usually been about R+3 except in 2000 (when it was infamously close to even) indicates big trouble for the Republican front-runner now-certain nominee of the Republican Party.  Obama nearly lost Florida in 2012 (making the difference between 303 and 332 and a close election and the unlikely result of an election with the mean in electoral votes), and Bill Clinton got mixed results in Florida. If Bill Clinton could lose the state once, then the state was not then easy picking for Democrats.

The recent precedents of Presidential elections remain 2000 to 2012. In each Florida was (2000) or could have been the difference between a Republican and Democratic win of the Presidency. People will be talking of the role of Florida in the 2000 election for decades. 2004? It was a decisive loss for Kerry, but it would have given him the election (although either Ohio or the combination of Colorado, Iowa, and New Mexico were closer). In 2008 and 2012 the question was of which state would put Obama over the top, and it turned out that some other state that Kerry lost in 2004 (it was a combination of Iowa, Nevada, and New Mexico that put Obama over the top; in 2012 it was going to be Colorado, Virginia, Ohio, or Florida, all of which Obama won).

2016 looks very different from 2012 at this point. In 2012 Obama was reasonably certain of having 263 electoral votes locked up (Gore 2000 + NH  or Kerry 2004 + IA+ NM) with four states with the possibility of deciding the election iffy (CO, FL, OH, VA). This time we have a difference: those states give Hillary Clinton a marked edge early. These are not coin-tosses.

A symptom of this reality is that states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin look as if they are completely off the table. The 2008 pattern of Obama winning states behind the Blue (Atlas Red) firewall by landslides and a few other states contestable but any one of them securing an Obama win looks like a better chance for Donald Trump than what he now has.

We are not accustomed to seeing Democratic landslides. We may see one this year.