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- Florida
- New York
- Wisconsin
Clinton supporters say that general-election polling doesn't mean anything right now, and they fervently believe that, I'm sure. Yet apparently all the rest of the general-election polling being done right now means very much indeed, and it's regularly quoted by Clinton supporters. Trump's favorability rating with women; the percentage of Sanders supporters who will support Clinton in the fall if she's the Democratic nominee; Clinton's ability to draw Latino Republican votes in November. All these polls matter, but the ones that show Sanders beating Trump senseless in November -- far more reliably than Clinton -- are so much flotsam, apparently.
3. The final word on electoral math, FiveThirtyEight.com, has Sanders at about 90% of his "delegate target" for winning the nomination via pledged delegates.
By way of comparison, that figure for Trump -- the presumptive Republican nominee -- is 96%. What's striking about this figure is that Sanders is at 90% in this measure with the half of the nominating process that's most favorable to him yet to come. Meanwhile, as of today Clinton is at her lowest point ever in this measure -- 110% -- and dropping fast. Things will get worse if, as anticipated, Clinton gets swept by Sanders in this weekend's Democratic primaries and caucuses.
Moreover, the projections FiveThirtyEight.com has made for how Sanders will perform in future caucuses are, in retrospect, laughable. The website presumes Sanders, if he wins these caucuses, will win them (and their delegates) at a 55% to 45% clip. The problem is, not only does the structure of caucuses make such close results unlikely, in actual fact Sanders has been winning caucuses by between 35 and 50 points. Indeed, FiveThirtyEight.com has been so foolhardy about Sanders' performance in caucuses that just this past Tuesday the website's founder (and the nation's top polling expert), Nate Silver, predicted that, in a best-case scenario, Sanders would lose 1 net delegate to Hillary Clinton after the votes in Arizona, Idaho, and Utah.
Instead, he gained 18 net delegates.
And his "delegate-target percentage" rose, after three relatively small states had voted, from 86% to 89%.
And the only news that came out of that "Western Tuesday" voting was: Hillary Clinton won Arizona.
4. Election Day voting results matter too -- they tell us what voters are thinking when they've reached peak pre-election familiarity with a candidate -- and in battleground states Bernie ties or beats Clinton more often than not in "live" voting.
About Hillary Clinton winning Arizona: she certainly did. She won early voting, which started weeks before Election Day -- well before Sanders had started advertising or campaigning in the state -- by 61.5% to 36.1%.
That's awesome.
So what actually happened on Election Day? She lost the live voting 52% to 48%, with thousands of provisional ballots yet to be counted -- the clear majority of which (and on this all pundits agree) will be votes for Sanders. These data were all available, this past Tuesday, simply by looking at Associated Press and New York Times live voting results and owning a calculator. Yet when they were reported by The Huffington Post as key components of the argument Sanders will make to super-delegates in Philadelphia once neither he nor Secretary Clinton have secured the Democratic nomination via pledged delegates alone, no less a "neutral" arbiter of this election cycle than The Washington Post sent its bloggers scurrying online to note, in a furious blur of one-handed typing, that Clinton's exit polls in Alabama looked amazing six weeks ago.
Here's the thing: Arizona's live voting results wouldn't matter so much if they weren't part of a pattern.
Clinton won North Carolina by 13.8% -- much less than the poll-predicted 24% -- but only won Election Day voting 52% to 48%.
In Illinois, she won the state narrowly (1.8%) but lost Election Day voting. Same thing in Massachusetts. Same thing in Missouri.
She saw massive decreases in her polling (and ultimately victory) margin in the week before Nevada. The same thing happened in Iowa, which ended in a tie. Early voting in Ohio favored Clinton by more than 30 points, but she won the state by only 13.8%.
Those who saw this data pattern and asked, anxiously, "What gives?" -- not conspiracy theorists or opponents of early voting, simply those who wondered whether maybe voters like Clinton less the more they see of her -- were told (in another bait-and-switch that left many scratching their heads) that they don't care about African-Americans or their votes.
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