It’s also moved from 5 to 7 twice. FWIW Wang has quoted 4 as more the longer term average with 3 up or down being a reasonable news cycle driven range. Hitting 7 and hitting 1 are both probable events to sometimes occur in that scenario. Going beyond those ranges require big events
Still yes with the right combination of news cycles it could get back to 1 again. Or to 7.*
But time is getting tight and more voters are more firm in their support.
And there is no reason to believe that Johnson voters and the still undecided will break, if they do break, more to Trump than to Clinton. The fairly consistent trend for Clinton’s lead to be higher when likely voters are asked to choose between the two rather than a four-way question (e.g. the current Fox poll +5 in the two-way to +3 in the four-way) if anything supports the opposite contention. Or they stay home. The Upshot just looked at who the undecided voters are.
*Personally I’d give the possibility of going up to 7 higher odds than going back down to 1. Trump does best in the polls when he relatively shuts his piehole. Seeing himself down 4 or 5 will incite him to do something dramatic and the odds are that his drama will be the news cycles that drive the margin up.
Pretty much how I see it as well. I thought Trump would suffer a 4 point drop in the first few days just based on his drubbing in the debates, but that would have been somewhat recoverable. It would have put him at a greater disadvantage, but nothing that couldn’t be corrected over time with shifts in news coverage and a better debate performance. But as you say, his post-debate meltdown is killing his chances. Trump doesn’t have time to recover from this and the damage has been inflicted over a wide geographic area.
If repubs are hanging their hats on the hopes of a natural disaster, history would suggest they’re going to be shit outta luck – this president has been infinitely better at responding to emergencies than his predecessor.
IIRC Trump is way down in NV, which tells me that he probably lost some voters for good there. He wasn’t going to win that state by much if he did, so I can’t imagine his campaign is too optimistic at this point.
If the race were to end today I’d probably give it to Clinton 307 to 231 but public opinion is still a little fluid even now and I’ll be curious to see a body of polling data in OH and NC before predicting a Hillary win there.
No one’s staking hopes on anything. It’s just a fact that a major disaster could be coming our way next week and FEMA’s performance could decide the election much as it did to his benefit in 2012.
The response in 2016 will be the same as it was in 2012. What might well change, however, is the response of a republican governor. Will there be a Chris Christie who graciously accepts the assistance of federal authorities, or are we going to see GOP mayors or governors rejecting aid at the expense of their constituents?
Illustrating the minor idiosyncratic nature of 538’s different models - all minimal shifts but NowCast and Polls-plus marginally down while Polls-only is marginally up.