Electoral College: Trump expected case vs Clinton hits new low

Since the last electoral college update there have been new polls in New York, Arizona, Utah and North Carolina. But the only notable change is in North Carolina:

With the latest polls, North Carolina moves from just barely Trump, to just barely Clinton. Either way, it is very close… and it has been bouncing back and forth since last fall. North Carolina is not necessarily showing any sort of trend here. Bottom line it is just a close state in this race.

But for the moment, this puts North Carolina back in Clinton’s column if everybody just wins all the states they are ahead in. So looking at the national picture:

The Clinton vs Trump “Expected Case” has been moving toward Clinton since January. With this update, Trump’s expected case is worse than it has been since Clinton vs Trump polling began.

Now, all the states in the “bubble” are by definition close. They could flip back. But this is starting to look like it might be a real trend and not just noise.

Right now, the expected case sits at Clinton 338, Trump 200… a 138 electoral vote margin for Clinton. For comparison, the Obama-Romney margin was 126 electoral votes.

There are eight states that are “close” right now. But seven of these eight are now leaning Clinton. And the one remaining state (Colorado) has only ONE actual Clinton vs Trump poll (from back in November), the average is still based mostly on how the state has gone in previous election years. It is certainly starting to look like most of the “traditional” battleground states are turning blue in this matchup. Again though, these states are close, and they might easily bounce back to Trump.

The range of reasonable possibilities is large here. Allowing all eight states to swing to one side or the other you get a range from Clinton winning by 156 to Trump winning by 70. Anything is still possible here.

But if Clinton vs Trump continues to look like the most likely combination, then we will probably also start getting more polling in the “Strong Trump” group of states. These have been very lightly polled and are still significantly based on previous election results, and the polls we do have tend to be older at this point. Given the trends in other states, perhaps some of these aren’t actually as “Strong Trump” as they initially seem. Or maybe they are. We shall see.

230.8 days until polls start to close. Things will be moving back and forth the whole time. Stay tuned.

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.

[Update 2016-03-23 18:18 to Fix Article title to Electoral College]