Electoral College: Cruz now within reach of Clinton

Since the last Electoral College Update there have been general election polls in Florida, Ohio and Illinois. There was no notable change to the front-running Clinton vs Trump pair, but there was significant movement in Clinton vs Cruz.

After more than a year on an upward trend, Cruz finally closes to within 5% of Clinton in Florida. Clinton now leads by only 3.8%. This makes Florida a “Weak Clinton” state and makes it a possible pickup for Cruz. Add this to Ohio from a few days ago and you have a breakthrough moment for Cruz:

For the first time, Cruz’s best case is actually to win. If Cruz won every state he leads, plus Nevada, Ohio, and Florida where he is close… then he wins by 10 electoral votes.

Without those three close states, he still loses by 96 electoral votes. But those three states ARE close, and for the very first time the possibility of Cruz pulling ahead and winning seems plausible.

The Florida move, plus yet another bump in Cruz’s direction in Ohio, also moved the tipping point:

Before the latest batch of updates, the tipping point had been New Hampshire, where Clinton is ahead by 6.4%. Now it is Florida, where Clinton is ahead by only 3.8%.

Florida and Ohio make a big difference, and Cruz is now making them both close.

Cruz had been the one Republican candidate that looked sure to lose in the general. But things change during a campaign, and he now has a shot. If he were to win the Republican nomination of course. Looking at the delegate race that still looks unlikely. But if we end up at a contested convention, anything could happen…

Note: This post is an update based on the data on ElectionGraphs.com. Election Graphs tracks both a poll based estimate of the Electoral College and a numbers based look at the Delegate Races. All of the charts and graphs seen in this post are from that site. Additional graphs, charts and raw data can be found there. 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 @ElectionGraphs on Twitter or like Election Graphs on Facebook to see announcements of updates or to join the conversation. For those interested in individual general election poll updates, follow @ElecCollPolls on Twitter for all the polls as they are added.