Electoral College: Bush Gaining in Iowa and a First Look at Rubio

Just a new batch of PPP polls in Iowa today. Two changes worthy of note:

Clinton vs Bush

Bush vs Clinton has been bopping up and down across the Clinton leads by 5% line. The average is now once again on the “Weak Clinton” side of this line… and the trend in the last few months seems to be in that direction. With this, we mark Iowa as “possible” for Bush and include it in his best case:

Why look there at that little peak stretching out over the past few weeks. This means that Bush’s best case is now to only lose by 12 electoral votes to Clinton. Bush only needs to get 6 more electoral votes worth of states to move into the “Weak Clinton” category to make his best case actually be to WIN. The best candidate right now is Minnesota (10 EV) where Clinton is ahead by 6.8%. (Minnesota also has only one Bush vs Clinton poll so far, and it was from October, so some new polling there is definitely needed… it may actually already be close, we just don’t have the polling to see it yet.)

Will this Bush surge in his “best case” continue? Will it start being followed by increases in his “expected case” as well? As usual, we await more polls to find out…

Clinton vs Rubio

The other major thing to come out of today’s polls, is that for the first time Clinton vs Rubio joins the “top five best polled candidate combinations” that I actively blog about, knocking off Clinton vs Ryan which hasn’t had new polling since Ryan announced he wasn’t going to run.

Since this combination is a new one for us to look at, rather than examining trends, lets look at the snapshot of where Clinton vs Rubio is right now:

So, not winning against Clinton, just like all the other Republicans at the moment. But lets look at some comparisons with the other well polled Republicans. Since the Republicans are all losing right now, the “expected case” isn’t as interesting. Lets look instead at the Republican “best cases” and the tipping points:

First the “best cases”. Rubio is second only to Bush (amongst the five best polled combinations) at how close things look if you give him all the close states. Bush loses by 12 electoral votes, Rubio loses by 26. (Going down the line, Huckabee loses by 84, Paul by 108, and Christie by 156.) This is all in the best case of course, the case where the Republican holds all of the states they are ahead in and also flips all the states where Clinton is ahead by less than 5%. A less than 5% lead is a slim on that can go away pretty quickly, or be wiped out by polling error, so this is an important metric to look at.

But if we want to look at “how far does the candidate have to move the polls to win” that is what the tipping point is all about, so moving on to that:

All five of the candidates here end up in “Strong Clinton” territory at the moment. Rubio is again doing second best of these five Republicans against Clinton. Clinton leads Bush by 6.8%, Rubio by 7.2%, Paul by 7.6%, Christie by 8.0%, and Huckabee by 8.1%. Within this comparison, Rubio doesn’t do all that badly against the field. It’s just that none of them are doing all that great.

Of course, this is the time to remind everybody that even though an 8% lead sounds huge, it means that only 4% of the voting public… or 1 person out of 25, needs to change their mind in order to flip the election. (Or the undecideds have to break solidly in favor of the challenger, or turnout heavily favors the challenger, etc.) Now, the American electorate is very strongly polarized right now. But is it that hard to imagine 1 out of 25 people changing their minds if a big scandal hits Clinton and sticks? Or the economy goes south before the election? Nope. It isn’t. This far out, anything can still happen. Views like this show where things stand NOW, not where they will be in 556 days.

Note: This post is an update based on the data on my 2016 Electoral College Analysis Site. All of the charts and graphs seen here are from that site. Graphs, charts and raw data can be found there for the race nationally and in each state for every candidate combination that has been polled at the state level. In addition, comparisons of the best polled candidate combinations both nationally and each in each state are available. All charts above are clickable to go to the current version of the detail page the chart is from, which may contain more up to date information than the snapshots on this page, which were current as of the time of this post.