It may well be that Clinton bottomed out and is now strengthening daily in the Democratic primary race, but her declines have not stopped on the general election front… at least not yet. The latest batch of polling shows her continuing to weaken against Rubio, in North Carolina this time:

The trend toward Rubio has continued for over 5 months now. With this latest update, the poll average has Rubio with a 5.2% lead. That is enough for us to take North Carolina out of the list of states that could go either way, and just give it to Rubio. For the moment anyway.

Insert here the usual reminder of just how far it is until the election and how things can change quickly.

In any case, this weakens Clinton’s “best case” a bit, leaving us with this:

Clinton losing North Carolina from her “maybe” column makes this already close matchup look even closer. Right now Rubio does better against Clinton than any of the other “five best polled” candidates, and that race is neck and neck.

We haven’t looked at a map in awhile here, so a quick look at what a neck and neck race with the Republican just barely eking out a win looks like:

Looks like a lot more red than blue, but a lot of the red states have fewer electoral votes, which is of course why you have to look at the numbers, not just the map.

Going forward, the main question is does Clinton stop her slide and start showing improved performance against Rubio and the other Republicans. With Biden out and Sanders seemingly at a plateau, Clinton can concentrate her efforts on the general election. She seems to be on a roll the last few weeks, turning around her primary poll numbers and for the first time in many months getting a lot of positive press. The unforced self-inflicted errors have not been present for a little while. This has done what it needed to amongst Democrats. I suspect that if Clinton doesn’t do anything to damage herself, and the Republicans continue as they are, we will indeed start to see some of the states that have moved away from Clinton over the past few months start drifting back.

As usual though, actual events may vary.

376.1 days until the general election polls start to close. Stay tuned.

Note: This post is an update based on the data on ElectionGraphs.com. 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. Follow @ElecCollPolls on Twitter for specific poll details as I add them. And like Election Graphs on Facebook!