This last week brought a new set of Ohio results from PPP. With this poll Clinton lost significant ground against basically all opponents in the averages. Concentrating as we usually do on the five best polled candidate combinations, this is what we see:
All five of these candidates improved against Clinton based on this latest poll. Looking back a little and comparing now with three months ago, we see that Paul, Bush and Christie have improved their positions, while Rubio and Huckabee have fallen further behind. Of these, Paul has moved the most, from down by 9.2% in March, to only down by 5.4% now, a gain of 3.8%. Paul now does the best of these five candidates against Clinton in Ohio.
Ohio is not a good place for Clinton to be losing ground. Ohio’s 18 electoral votes can make a huge difference. Many paths for Republican victory require Ohio. And the losses here are quite possibly indicative of similar slippage in other states that haven’t been polled enough lately to see it yet. This is not a happy trend for Team Clinton.
Lets switch to looking nationally. Do we see loss of ground there too?
These changes in the Ohio average directly change the tipping point for two of the five candidates, Paul and Huckabee. Paul moves from being down by 7.6% with the tipping point in Ohio, to only being down 7.0% in Minnesota. Meanwhile Huckabee moves from being down 8.1% with the tipping point in Ohio, to being down 7.8%, with his tipping point still in Ohio.
But lets look again at all five candidates against Clinton over not just this change, but the last few months:
Once again lets compare now to three months ago. Remember, the tipping point essentially represents how much national public opinion needs to move to flip the electoral college result. Paul, Huckabee, Christie and Rubio have all improved since March. Only Bush has declined in that timeframe. (Bush is still better than he was six months ago though.)
Also once again, Paul has improved the most against Clinton during that the last three months, going from down 8.8%, to only down 7.0%.
And yes, yes, all five of these candidates are still way behind. But the overall movement seems to be in the Republican’s favor at the moment. If these trends continue, before too long we may have an actual race on our hands instead of a Clinton blowout!
As I noted in the latest Curmudgeon’s Corner podcast, the real media bias is toward having an exciting race, and while I’m not “the media” I am not immune to this bias… a closer race is a more fun race to watch… so I’ll always be rooting for whoever is behind. :-)
Seriously though, when I posted my first analysis of the 2016 race on this site in November, I mentioned that we should expect tightening, and that Clinton would most likely never again look as good as she did then. The general public had barely heard of most of the non-Clinton candidates, she had come off her Secretary of State stint with fairly high approval ratings, and the campaign against her had yet to start in earnest… and she had been keeping quiet, so fewer opportunities for her to make mistakes too.
As things get in to gear, all of those things change. We’ve just seen the very beginnings of this, and already there is a visible impact in Clinton’s lead. Her lead is still a healthy one, but we’re definitely seeing the signs of the battle starting to be engaged.
513 days to go.
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.