CBS Newspoll - National: Hillary + 9 (4-way)/+11 (2-way)

[Likely Voter]

To put this into perspective, the same poll was showing Obama + 2 at this point in 2012.

Extending that out, if you average the mid-October polls from ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX and Monmouth from 2012 you get Obama +0.6. If you did the same for those polls this time (H2H) you get Clinton +9.0

[Likely Voter]

Dem margin in mid-October

Poll   '12   '16
FOX   -1   8
CBS   2   11
NBC   0   10
ABC   3   4
Monmouth   -1   12
FOX   -1   8

[Likely Voter]

Remember that it took Sandy to give Obama a boost later in October.

There were six polling firms that did polls after Sandy that also did polls in mid to late October (before Sandy). The avg before Sandy in those polls was 0.3 and after Sandy was 1.3. So Obama appears to have got a small bump, but some of those polls were also done before and after the 3rd debate (in which Obama was declared the winner in polls).

Basically from the time of the first debate in 2012 the race was pretty close to a tie all the way until election day.

Except for the week of the RNC and a couple of weeks around her Sept. 11 stumble, Clinton's margin over Trump has been greater than Obama's margin over Romney all Summer and into the Fall and that difference is only getting bigger.

[Likely Voter]

Really crazy in retrospect how confident Democrats (myself included) were going into election night 2012.

Well you had solid state polling to back it up.

Yes and no. This is from 538 on Oct. 31, 2012.




Most (myself included) assumed Obama's 'firewall' was WI, PA, IA, NV and OH.  As it turned out both OH and PA were more R than anyone realized, with OH actually being more R than the national avg so it was not actually in the firewall (you could argue that VA and CO were but they were right on the cusp of the natl avg).  If Romney did actually pull close to a tie he could have won with FL/OH/VA/CO (which was his narrow path strategy in terms of spending).