Which is why if you want a Competent president, everyone here needs to get out and vote.
I’d love it if your bones are right, but I think there are too many voters today that are so tribal they will always vote for whomever has the R or D after their name. I think it will be a long, long time before either major party candidate goes under 40% in a two-way race. Even Mondale got 40.6% of the popular vote in 1984, and that was in the biggest electoral landslide since George Washington.
For completeness, the rest of the 20th century sub-40s in a 2-way race are:
McGovern - 37.5% - 1972
Goldwater - 38.5% - 1964.
Alf Landon - 36.5% - 1936
Herbert Hoover (incumbent) - 39.7% 1932
James Cox - 34.2% - 1920 - To date that’s the floor. That’s the lowest ever in a race without a significant third party presence.
The only way I see Trump going under 40% is if Johnson does a lot better than I think he will, say 7% or higher.
My guess:
Clinton 48%
Trump 42%
Johnson 5%
Others - add up to 5%
Over 1/3 of the registered voters in my county have already voted. It’s not unusual for only 1/3 of the registered voters to even vote in a general non-presidential election, so something tells me there aren’t many just sitting it out this time. FWIW, about 50% voted in 2012 presidential election.
Just be careful when you vote.
Some of those “Poll Watchers” know about voting ahead of time too. If they’ve already voted and if they can pick a fight with you in the parking lot before you can get in to vote, its no skin off of their nose…
Actually, is there a DOJ phone number to call if we see groups of “Poll Watchers” starting to intimidate people…? If there is one, we really need to start posting it…
I am voting for Gary Johnson and hope he can get to 5% to get the Libertarians classified as a major party with Federal matching funds. On the off chance that he wins a state and forces the vote into the House, perhaps he could win. 1% long short sure, but I see no reason to vote for Trump or Hillary.
And if you don’t see it by now, ain’t nothing I’m gonna say likely to change that. Bless your heart!
Almost forgot, NPR had a Market Watch segment this morning about all the foreign investment money being drawn out of the US stock market prior to the election. Cited polling uncertainty with a reminder of how the Brexit vote was polling with a nice margin for “stay” until the votes were counted. Probably a chicken hatching parable in there someplace.
…and that’s different than the trump supporters who feel in their bones that a wave of secret Trump voters will rush the polls carrying him to victory how?
Probably wishful thinking but here’s some news that may make Boyo happy. 28% of early Republican voters voted for Clinton. It could be 48-40 Clinton.
I’m going with Loach, more or less: 45-47%. Despite all the tumult of the past month, Mr. Trump seems to have wised up a little: he goes to his rallies, whoops up the rubes, goes on to the next one and otherwise keeps his goldfish-like mouth shut. He’s still saying insane shit, but the key seems to be it’s all the same insane shit we’ve heard many times before, so the shock effect has worn off. He likewise seems to have finally gotten the message that his famous 3AM Tweets were not serving him entirely well.
Meanwhile the FBI and the news media have gone baying after Mrs. Clinton, since apparently she is now personally responsible for every e-mail ever saved on a computer anywhere in the world, thus taking a bit of the previous heat off the Orange One.
We thus seem to have completely forgotten that just a couple of weeks ago, Mr. Trump was supposedly running one of the most spectacularly inept campaigns in modern history. So yeah, 45-47% sounds about right.
Trump winning 40% just means 1 out of 5 republicans chose not to vote for him for president. Considering how he has pissed off women, minorities and the educated, I can see that happening.
Well, he got under 40% of this vote. 
Seriously, though, I can’t get to the detailed page, an it’s annoying. I certainly don’t think the real results will look anything like this, but I’m interested in the differences between ages. But I’m not so interested that I’ll go back to check again at a later date.
Edit: Clinton won Scholastic’s, too. With Trump under 40%.
I continue to find these exit polls a bit hard to believe. They are self selected groups.
All the polls indicate a very close race. Why would she suddenly crush him? If Clinton won by EIGHT in Florida it would be a massacre across the country completely out of kilter with two thousand or more polls.
They severely undercounted Obama in NV in 2012, likely do to vastly under counting Hispanic voters. It may be happening again, in more states. Or maybe not. We’ll know soon.
Right about now I’d settle for a Clinton victory by 3/5 points. Certainly not seeing any evidence to project a Trump disaster. The emails though…
At this point, I’ll be surprised if HRC gets 50% of the vote.
If anything, I would expect the opposite, that a number of conservatives will publicly say that they didn’t vote for him, but in the voting booth, they will vote for him.
Depends on gender. It’s been speculated, and it wouldn’t surprise me, that a nontrivial number of women in conservative families favor Clinton, but are keeping their mouths shut to keep the peace since the men in their lives are loudly pro-Trump.
That “poll watcher” intimidation hotline would have been helpful in this incident. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neGbKHyGuHU
That’s pit language in the South.