Just hours before polls open on the East Coast on Tuesday, celebrity pollster Nate Silver’s final — or very nearly final — analysis of a throng of presidential polls shows Democrat Hillary Clinton holding a national lead between 3 and 4 points over Republican Donald Trump.
As of Monday evening, Silver’s ever-shifting prediction model at the website FiveThirtyEight says Clinton currently has a 70 percent chance to beat Trump in Tuesday’s election.
Clinton’s odds of victory increased modestly just in the last 24 hours, according to Silver, from 65 percent to 70 percent.
“Clinton has had a good run in the polls in the final days of the campaign,” he writes. “Clinton’s projected margin of victory in the popular vote has increased to 3.5 percent from 2.9 percent.”
There may be more polling data by tomorrow morning — or not. “I’m not sure how much more data we’re really expecting,” Silver notes, observing that “most of it will probably just be state and national tracking polls that run one last update.”
An influx of new polling data caused Silver to change his prediction for three highly influential swing states: Florida, North Carolina and Nevada. Silver now predicts that a majority of voters in those three states will select Clinton.
As recently as this weekend, FiveThirtyEight had predicted Florida, North Carolina and Nevada as either toss-ups or leaning toward Trump.
On Sunday, the political statistician had officially projected that Trump had a 52 percent chance of winning Florida, compared to only a 48 percent chance for Clinton. Trump made incredible progress in the state, coming up from a 22 percent chance as of Oct. 15. Clinton has fallen from a 78 percent chance of winning the state since Oct. 15. (RELATED: Nate Silver Projects Trump Will Win Florida)
Roughly 24 hours later, however, Silver had bumped Clinton back on top in the Sunshine State, giving her a 54 percent chance to win compared to Trump’s 46 percent chance.
“It’s unlikely that any further states will flip to Clinton in our final forecast, as she’s too far behind in Ohio, the next-closest state,” Silver says.
“It’s possible that Florida and North Carolina could flip back to Trump by tomorrow morning, though probably not Nevada, where Clinton’s lead is a bit larger.”
A slew of national polls released on Monday have mostly coalesced to a consensus prediction that Clinton will win the national vote by a modestly comfortable margin.
Out of 19 polls released since October 31, seven show Clinton winning the national vote by a comfortable 4 percentage points. Four polls show Clinton winning nationally 3 points. Two show Clinton winning by 2 points. One shows Clinton winning the total vote by a razor-thin margin of one point.
Three polls have Clinton winning nationally by a larger margin — either 5 or 6 points.
Just two polls predict that Trump will win the national vote. One of them predicts that Trump will win by two points. The other predicts that Trump will win by 5 points.
The outlier poll predicting a 5-point Trump win is the USC Dornsife/LA Times poll, which has had Trump winning for months. That poll’s unique methodology has also consistently polled subsets of the same larger group of people.
Interestingly, despite the USC Dornsife/LA Times poll, the Los Angeles Times itself published a story on Sunday predicting a landslide win for Clinton — 352 Electoral College votes for Clinton to 186 for Trump.
“Clinton is the favorite, and perhaps has a slight wind at her back for Election Day,” Silver writes.
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