Politico Survey of GOP Operatives for State of Race. Short Version - Trump is Done.
By khyber900
Thursday Sep 08, 2016 · 12:15 PM PDT
Politico has a new article about Trump’s electoral prospects entitled “Trump’s Shrinking Swing State Map”.
They conducted interviews with more than 2 dozen GOP operatives, state party officials and elected leaders. The questions focused on the state of the race in 11 battleground states. Here are some key observations:
*Colorado, New Hampshire and Virginia are “close to un-winnable” for Trump.
*Trump has lost ground (needs to ‘recapture steam’) in PA. He now trails by 10 points per Politico’s own battleground state polling average. (Politico never releases this poll, but they put it into their articles from time to time).
*Trump has lost ground in Wisconsin and the state “could find itself off the map” soon. Per the article he appears to be below the GOP baseline in Southeast Wisconsin.
*Michigan has been placed in the bottom tier of pickup opportunities next to NH. Even crappy polls like Emerson give Clinton a clear lead in the state.
*Florida, Iowa, Nevada, North Carolina and Ohio remain tight according to the polling averages. However, I would note that Clinton has held a clear lead in the majority of polls conducted in FL, NC and OH. NV appears to be drifting quietly into the blue column as even these internet surveys can’t unskew a lead for Trump. IA is tight, but the PPP poll showing Clinton +2 and the fact that Hillary’s team in IA has already made about 1 million contacts tell me that she is going to be a tough out there. It also underscores to me some of Trump’s weakness. IA has the largest percentage of non-college educated whites among battleground states (45%). If he can’t win there, he can’t win anywhere. It tells me that his appeal does not reach much beyond the GOP base and if Bernie voters get behind Clinton she should be able to win it by a solid margin.
Tony Fabrizio, who is a veteran GOP pollster, is the guy doing polls for Trump. They will be making decisions on cutting the cord on certain states and focusing on others over the next 2 weeks.
They will likely cut the cord in NH and try to go all-in on VA. Some (but clearly not all) VA GOP operatives think that despite the bad polling, Trump could make a comeback there as Ken Cuccinelli did in his narrow loss against McCaulife. My response to that is : general election vs. off year election, Tim Kaine, and the fact that Donald Trump is loathed by normal people, a lot of whom live in NOVA.
There is also the factor of Clinton’s very real expansion into GA, AZ and NE-2 (by way of Iowa spend). That is complicating their decision making.
Basically, if you follow the thread of this article, she is already at 273 EVs and is likely to clear 300 fairly easily. The observations here seem to align to the Politico article last week with David Plouffe.
60 days or so to go, but we’re in good shape.