Clinton vs Trump. 7 August 2016, 93 days from the election

It was a bad week for Donald Trump. I fully expect that to be the lede on this blog many times between now and November. The numbers, nuts and bolts are at the end of the post, so if that's all you want, feel free to skip ahead. The beginning of this post is me playing Q&A with myself.

What were the big changes this week? The states that moved from one category to another are New Hampshire (Solid Trump to Leaning Clinton) and Nevada (Leaning Trump to Leaning Clinton).

How was New Hampshire in Solid Trump? A Republican polling company called Inside Sources has Trump winning big. I had never heard of them before, but that's because they re-branded after a disastrous 2012. There were only two polls in July, so they counted as half the median computation and swamped the other poll. A new poll made three polls and the Inside Sources numbers became just a poll to the right of the median. This is the way big swings happen in the median. It gets rarer as more polls get taken every week.

Is there any information that you need to make a better snapshot? The most glaring is the two week hiatus polling companies have taken in Ohio. There is no question that it is still a battleground state until evidence says it isn't, one way or another. 

You said you expect more bad weeks for Trump. Why? Bad things happen when he talks, and he's always talking.

I will admit I am obsessed with the election. I wish I wasn't, because it is not great for my mental health or blood pressure. I report the data I have accurately. A good week for Trump is going to mess me up if it is a major shift, but I don't know if that will happen and I'll be surprised if it is enough to swing the tide now.

Why are you skeptical he can swing the election his direction? Good question, multiple part answer.

1. His personality. Much like with Goldwater, people are pestering psychologists and psychiatrists for diagnoses. It's not that fancy. He's dishonest because lying and scamming have worked for him in the past. He is an egomaniac because he is the CEO of a company with no strong board of directors to reign him in and it is his nature.

I am more of a mathematician than a historian, but I can keep a lot of information in my brain. CEOs without restraining Boards of Directors are like absolute monarchs. Some were timid, some thoughtful, some egomaniacs and assholes. Trump is in the last category. Others of his ilk are Henry VIII, George III, Kaiser Bill and several of the Roman emperors. Trump is orders of magnitude more ignorant than the other people on this list.

2. His opponents understand his weaknesses very well and good information is spreading. He loves to talk in front of big crowds, but he must answer any slight that gets under his skin, which is nearly everything. The Clinton campaign and the media looking into his past are finding stuff that he has to respond to. Some might compare him to Pavlov's dog; I think he's more like a single celled organism.

And then there are the more clever insights. Of everything I have read this week, I give highest grades to Wil Wheaton, whose 21st Century claims to fame are equally as an actor and a board game enthusiast. He is the first person I read who came to the conclusion that Trump's constant plead "Believe me!" is actually a tell, a nervous tic that gives away information. He says it when he's lying. I give Wheaton full marks here because I hadn't seen anyone else say it before, and I'm fuming a little that I didn't see it myself. My sad excuse is that it's been so long since I played poker, my reading skills have gone to crap.

Let me repeat. My excuse is sad.

3. Trump is not running a campaign. It was obvious very early on that Ben Carson was really on a book tour and not a campaign to be President of the United States. Trump is also running a scam, but not a book tour scam.  This week, we found out clear recurring donations to his campaign were nearly impossible to turn off. (As a note of full disclosure, some left wing causes have the same bug/feature in their design, including Equality California, who wouldn't let me out of a monthly payment until the card was discarded for other reasons.) More than money, talking in front of big cheering crowds is a massive turn-on for him. He is making no effort to build his base; he doesn't want votes, he wants strokes, and cheering crowds give him big league strokes. (Aside: some people think he used the non-existent word "bigly" once. I am sure he said "big league". Let's not lie about him, the truth is bad enough.) 

4. Clinton can stumble, but to steal the spotlight from Trump's mouth, she has to fall off the side of a mountain. Bad things can still happen to Hillary's campaign, but to get the spotlight off the egomaniac Trump, it has to be a stumble that is a multiple week story with lasting consequences, somewhere along the lines of Romney's 47% comments, and even that may not be enough to turn the tide.

Enough yammering, now the numbers.

Solid Trump (more than 95% Confidence of Victory [CoV]): ND WY ID WV OK AL NE KY KS LA TN SD MO AR TX AK MT MS SC IN 
Total: 158
Leaning Trump (between 50% and 95% CoV for Trump): AZ IA GA UT
Total: 39
Toss-up (exactly 50% CoV): OH 
Total: 18
Leaning Clinton (between 50% and 95% for Clinton): NH NV OR FL WI
Total: 56
Solid Clinton (more than 95% CoV for Clinton): NC VA ME CT PA NM MI CO DE WA NJ NY MD CA RI IL VT HI DC MA
Total: 267

The current count: 
Clinton 323  
Trump 197
Toss-up 18 

The change from last week is that one Solid Trump and one Leaning Trump moved to Leaning Clinton. That is the direction the wind is currently blowing. More than that, if prior data, both in terms of previous years and the change from July to August can be trusted, Ohio will likely move to leaning Clinton and Oregon and Wisconsin will both move to Solid Clinton. While Ohio would be nice to know, if Oregon or Wisconsin makes the move and everything else remains static, Clinton has enough electoral votes in the Solid range to win.

To repeat: If Oregon or Wisconsin polling looks better for Clinton in the next few weeks, Solid Clinton makes her president, as in "Game over, man!" Trump's odds will shrink to less than a tenth of a percent.

And now the odds of victory. Here are the 15 states with the highest expected value, which makes them most likely to sway the tide. Of those 15, the 11 that really can be seen as battleground currently are written in order of most likely Trump first to most likely Clinton last. Ohio is a toss-up right now, so you can see the cut-off point.

AZ IA GA UT OH NH NV OR FL WI NC

Current probability of victory if the election were held today:

Clinton 99.6%
Trump 0.4%
 
Yes, that's right. Trump was at 1.1% in last week's snapshot and things got worse. Looking back at my data, Romney was as 0.4% when his worst gaffe completely sunk in, but he got something like a second wind after Obama had a bad performance in the first debate. The way things are going, I'm not sure there are going to be any debates.

I'll be back next weekend, both Saturday and Sunday. The Saturday posts will be about the Senate races.

Frequently asked questions about methodology

Where do you get your data? I use two websites, Real Clear Politics and Pollster, the website now owned by The Huffington Post. The articles on RCP lean to the right and the articles on Pollster lean to the left, but both are reliable reporters of polling results.

Are the any polls you don't use? In the past, I used any poll either of those two websites decided to print. I have started a new policy of not using data where the polling sample is only of "adults". I will use polls that ask the question if people are registered or likely voters.

Do you "skew" the results? Not exactly. Back in 2012 when the state polling data showed how much of a disadvantage Romney faced, a fellow named Dean Chambers decided to look at the mix of independents, Republicans and Democrats each poll used and "fix" the ones he thought undersampled Republicans. Doing this, he showed Romney with a comfortable lead. Conservatives loved this and Chambers became a hero. After the election when his methodology was shown to be defective, he admitted his error, but within a few months he convinced himself he wasn't wrong and there had been irregularities at the polls. Most people ignored him.

I do change the results I get, but I don't change who has the lead. For example, a poll in June from Nevada with a sample size of 300 showed Trump with a 47% to 45% lead. Multiplying the sample size by the percentages, this would say 141 people favored Trump and 135 people favored Clinton. I take these numbers and effectively ignore people who are undecided or voting for someone else. Of the 276 people choosing one of the two most popular candidates, Trump has 51.1% and Clinton 48.9%. These are the values I use to get a probability from an assumed normally distributed set. If you are familiar with Excel, the formula I use here is

=NORMDIST(0.511,0.5,SQRT((0.511*0.489)/276),1)

This gives Trump a Confidence of Victory number of 64.10% in this case.

What about third party candidates? Confidence of Victory does have methods to deal with third party candidates or even more candidates. Unless the third party candidate is within a few percentage points of the two favorites, the CoV number for third place (or fourth place) becomes microscopic.

What if no polls exist? At the time this FAQ is being written, there are still many states that haven't been polled. In that case, I use the 2012 result for that contest and assume a sample size of 200.

What if more than one poll exists? I sort the polls by date and take the median of what I consider to be the freshest polls.

Why median instead of average? Median is not effected by polls that disagree with the consensus by a large amount, what we call outliers. Average does get skewed by these polls.

Define "freshest". In previous years, I usually started poll aggregation after Labor Day, but the conventions were early this year and so I start my collection of data in August instead of September. The polling companies have not ramped up to full frenzy, so many states that are considered battleground still have just a few polls. In ideal situations, I only look at polls no more than a week older that the most recent. In this early going, I stretched that out. In June, I'd use any polls from June and now, I usually stretch the freshness mark to two weeks if there has been a poll in July.

How do you create your probability of victory number? I choose 15 battleground states using this algorithm.

1) If the CoV number in a state is between 50% and 90% for the leader, that state is a battleground.
2) If this method gives us less than 15 states, states where the CoV is between 90% and 95% are added to the mix.
3) If we still fall short of 15, states with CoV over 95% are added on the basis of CoV times the number of electoral votes, which is called the expected value of the contest.

With 15 states, we have 2^15 or 32,768 possible outcomes. Each of these probabilities is tallied in the column of who ever wins the scenario. If a scenario is a 269-269 tie, I assume the House of Representatives will elect Trump, since the House currently has a large Republican majority. If Trump does well enough to tie, it is very unlikely the Republicans will lose the House.

What do you consider a toss-up state? Exactly 50%-50%. Any slight edge puts a contest in the column of the leader.

Does your system ever get predictions wrong? Yes, but in the general election it is rare. In the primaries, it's much more common for polls to get the result wrong. Bernie Sanders big win in Michigan primary is an obvious example from this year, and primaries with a lot of candidates can produce surprises as well. Polls do a bad job of predicting caucus winners, since the number of caucus voters is much smaller than the number who would vote in a primary. American elections are much longer than elections in most of the world and by November, the vast majority of people have chosen their candidate and the get out the vote campaigns are more important than ads trying change people's minds late in the game.

My other assumption about the bad performance of polls in primaries is the amount of time voters have taken to think about the candidates, especially in a multi-candidate race. The differences between the several candidates from the same party are usually not as stark as the differences between two candidates from different parties.

If you have any other questions, please add them in the comments. I'll try to add as many as possible to this list.

Clinton vs. Trump. 31 July 2016, 100 days from the election

Hello, friends, family and strangers. Welcome to the first of the weekly reports on the 2016 presidential electoral college race between Hillary R. Clinton and Donald J. Trump. I include strangers because I am making an effort on social media - notably Twitter and Facebook - to get this blog out to as many people as possible because the most respected name in poll aggregation, Nate Silver, is producing something called a "now-cast" that says the race for the presidency is close.

My numbers say it isn't. My numbers do not claim to be predictor of the election, only a snapshot of what the polls say today. Even so, what is being reported by Nate Silver amounts to mathematical malpractice and people need to know not all aggregators agree with him.

If you are a stranger, your first question should be: Who the hell is this guy?

I'm the guy who beat Nate Silver in 2008 and beat him again in 2012. 

If I had some small disagreement with Silver's numbers, I might send him snide messages on Twitter, which he would likely ignore. The thing is, my numbers don't say a small difference. He said Trump was leading early this week and after the convention he now says it's 51%-49% for Clinton.

To repeat, I don't call my numbers a prediction, just a snapshot of what polls say now.

The snapshot says 99% to 1% for Clinton.

Let me quote Glengarry Glen Ross.

"You think I am fucking with you? I am not fucking with you."

We are 100 days away from the election and it feels like 100 years in purgatory. Having someone you trust telling you to worry makes it worse.

I'm here to say I'm as good as Nate Silver is (okay, just a little better) and right now he is peddling crap just as stinky as Ron Fournier, Howard Kurtz or Mark Halperin.

Let's go to the numbers, shall we?

The current count: 
Clinton 313
Trump 207
Toss-up 18 

In my system, only 50%-50% counts as a toss-up.

You might notice that Trump's red line is trending upward and Clinton's blue line is trending downward.

It is worrying, but not distressing.

Here is how we get to this state of affairs. These numbers will explain my lack of distress.

Solid Trump (more than 95% Confidence of Victory [CoV]): ND WY OK ID WV KY AL NE KS TN LA SD MO AR NH TX AK MT MS SC IN 
Total: 162
Leaning Trump (between 50% and 95% CoV for Trump): AZ GA IA NV UT
Total: 45
Toss-up (exactly 50% CoV): OH 
Total: 18
Leaning Clinton (between 50% and 95% for Clinton): FL OR WI
Total: 46
Solid Clinton (more than 95% CoV for Clinton): MA DC HI CA VT IL RI MD NY NJ WA DE CO NM PA CT VA NC MN ME MI
Total: 267

The number that explains my current relative lack of distress: 267 Solid Clinton electoral votes. Yes, that's 267 out of a necessary 270. If she holds onto the stuff where she looks very good right now and wins Oregon or Wisconsin, she's the next president. Obama won both those states comfortably, and there are many other possible paths with nice noticeable odds, paths with over a 1% chance of happening. Trump's best single path to victory is currently at 0.05%.

For people who like to gamble, that path is now at 1 chance in 2,000.


The numbers that still give me distress: I wish this was a blow-out that would repudiate Trumpism for several elections to come. I don't think Clinton can get to 400 electoral votes, but over 350 is in the realm of possibility and that would be good. Under 300 would be a bad thing.

A blowout may not be needed to show all the cracks in the GOP coalition. We could see some very messed up stuff for them even before November.

 

And now the numbers that might make anyone to the left of Mitch McConnell sleep better this week.

Current probability of victory if the election were held today:

Clinton 98.9%
Trump 1.1%

Feel any better, my left leaning friends? If so I'm glad. I live to serve.

To get an idea historically, Trump is in much worse shape right now than McCain or Romney were after the conventions were over. One advantage both the last two Republican nominees had was when it came to battleground states, they weren't playing defense. States didn't lean Republican, they were almost all Solid Republican, even the most contentious having a 95% Confidence of Victory for the GOP or better, most well over 99% CoV. They just had to steal several states from Obama, much easier said than done. Trump not only has to steal, he has to worry about states that were solidly Republican in the last few electoral contests. Playing defense in Utah and Georgia really surprises me, and I wouldn't be surprised to see them go back to Solidly Trump, but right now the deal has not been closed. 

Once again, this is a snapshot and not a prediction. If you look around and think Trump is running a fucked-up campaign, here's some confirmation. The polls are saying most Americans agree with you.

To reiterate, if I pretty much agreed with Nate Silver's numbers, I wouldn't be trying to get this out to a larger audience. But we don't agree and I'm better than he is, based on the evidence from 2008 and 2012.

I'm a nerd and I'm a geezer, so let me quote The Guns of Will Sonnett.

"No brag, just fact."

     
(Note: Thanks to Ellis Weiner for his unpaid copy editing.)
  

Clinton vs. Trump:The pre-convention landscape

In previous years, I made the assumption that people aren't paying much attention until after the conventions and are not fully committed until after Labor Day. But looking at my Twitter and Facebook feeds, this assumption doesn't hold up. It is a tired cliche to call the current presidential election "the most important of our lifetime", but we really do have a stark contrast between the candidates, and the inclusion of Donald Trump makes this easily the weirdest election I have seen personally, which takes us back to 1968.

My personal feelings: I am definitely anti-Trump and not keenly pro-Hillary. I know more than a few people on the left that take every negative view of Clinton as gospel, and that makes me wonder about her chances, but my training is as a mathematician. I would rather speak with data available to back up my positions rather than anecdote or even a well thought out think piece. I certainly read as much as I can get my hands on about the election, but I'm putting the numbers forward in these posts.

How good are the numbers? They are getting better. I now have polls from 26 states in May, June and July, the months when the presumptive nominees have been clear. Of course, I'd like to have some polling in all 51 contests being held in the Electoral College, but there are some where prior elections and demographics are good enough to be confident of the outcome. Donald Trump is not going to win the District of Columbia, and Hillary Clinton should not rely on electoral votes from North or South Dakota, just to give a few examples.

Any surprises so far? Yes. If all polls are weighted equally, Oregon and Utah could be battlegrounds. Utah as a battleground would be horrendous news for the Republicans and Battleground Oregon would be bad news for the Democrats.

Do you give all polls equal weight? If they are current and they ask respondents if they are registered to vote, yes I do. I've done poll aggregation in four presidential elections now, and if I see a brand name I don't know, I'm wary, but I still count the numbers. If the unknown pollster identifies as Republican, I'm more disgusted than wary, but I still count them. In 2008 and 2012, the Republican pollsters were generally so far off from the truth, their clients should have had a case to sue for fraud. Oregon is a battleground due to only having two polls and one of them is from an off-brand Republican outfit.

What do you count as "battleground" states? That will change from post to post. When a state has a Confidence of Victory number for the leader between 50% to 60%, that is a clear battleground. If the number is over 60% and under 90%, I consider that to be "leaning" and over 90% is solid.

Where does that put us right now? Ah, good now we get to the numbers.

Solidly Trump: ND WY OK ID WV AL KY NE TN LA SD AR TX AK MT KS MO MS SC IN
Total electoral votes in Solidly Trump: 158

Leaning Trump: GA AZ
Total electoral votes in Leaning Trump: 27 (grand total:185)

Battleground favoring Trump: IA UT
Total electoral votes in Battleground Trump: 12 (grand total:197)

Toss-up state: OH
Electoral in Toss-up state: 18

Solidly Clinton:VT MA HI DC CA NY RI MD DE IL WA NJ CO MI NM CT VA NC MN ME WI
Total electoral votes in Solidly Clinton: 257

Leaning Clinton: NH OR PA
Total electoral votes in Leaning Clinton: 31 (grand total: 288)

Battleground favoring Clinton: NV FL
Total electoral votes in Battleground Clinton: 35 (grand total: 323)

Current totals: Clinton 323, Trump 197, Toss-up 18
Totals from last post: Clinton 336, Trump 187, Toss-up 15
Comparison to 2012: Obama 332, Romney 206

Okay, back to regular size font not in bold. Trump has had a positive couple weeks, but he still hasn't caught up with Romney's numbers from 2008, which means he is still losing and losing by a lot.

Things can change. If they couldn't change, I wouldn't be writing this blog. Trump is currently telegraphing a strategy of focusing on New York and California, which are currently extreme long shots and are demographically stacked against him. The "easiest" path for Trump is to win all his Solid and Leaning States, hold on to Iowa and Utah, take Ohio from the toss-up and score what are now upsets in Nevada, Florida and Pennsylvania to get to 270 exactly. Oregon could help by replacing another state with 6 or 7 electoral votes.

Currently, Nate Silver is giving Trump a 35% chance of winning the election. Looking at most likely paths, I would put that number at less than 5% currently, but I don't put much stock in such numbers so far out from Election Day. 

Mr. Silver is better known than I am, but he's not better at this. I got more stuff right than he did in both 2008 and 2012. The best known poll aggregator I trust is Sam Wang at Princeton. Here is a link to his website.

Back at the end of July when both conventions will be history.


 

Clinton vs. Trump:Way Too Early 2: Electric Boogaloo

Last month, when the presumptive nominees became clear for both parties, I switched from checking the primaries to looking at November. I think this is still much too early, but this is a strange election in many ways, so here I am giving a snapshot of the electoral college before either convention.

The main strange thing is that both candidates are famous even to people who usually pay minimal attention to politics, and more than that, both candidates have more people that dislike them than like them. Obama has very high approval ratings for a guy in his last year, and some of that is because people are looking at who is going to be the next act on stage, and they aren't looking forward to it.

In any case, here's the snapshot based on still sketchy data.

How sketchy is the data? There are now a total of 20 states that have been pooled in either May or June, up from 14 in May alone.

Battleground states with no information so far: Indiana and Nevada

Changes from May: Kansas got polled and Hillary is ahead. It's just one poll and I don't want to make that much of it, but it is included in this month's snapshot. I don't consider it impossible. Governor Sam Brownback slashed taxes and has put the state in a serious hole. The love affair with small government conservatism may be fading. The other change is North Carolina going from Leaning Trump to Too Close to Call, which means it's a flat-footed tie at 50-50 as of one poll coming in this morning.

That means as of June 26, the electoral college snapshot is 336 for Clinton, 187 for Trump and 15 electoral votes too close to call.

The Golden Spike: The idea here is to rank the states from easiest for Trump to win to most difficult for Trump to win. (From the other vantage point, we can say it ranked for hardest for Hillary to easiest for her.) Currently, the Golden Spike is in Michigan, which has a Confidence of Victory number of 87% for Clinton right now. Assuming these numbers are somewhat accurate - which is a very generous assumption right now - here's the most direct path for Trump to get over 270 electoral votes, assuming he win all the states were he is currently favored.

North Carolina: 50% chance for Trump
Ohio: 37% chance for Trump
Colorado: 36%  chance for Trump
Oregon: 35%  chance for Trump
Pennsylvania: 25% chance for Trump

Michigan:  14% chance for Trump

There are other paths to victory as well, but all of the paths are about 1,000 to 1 shots or worse. Adding up the most likely, he is right now about a 500 to 1 underdog. There are other ways to win, but all of them require flipping a state where he has less than a 10% chance to win, according to the current numbers. 

In summary: It's still way too early for my Confidence of Victory numbers to live up to their name. I usually start making my "early predictions" in mid-October. Ignoring the national polls and going with what state-by-state data we have, Trump is in trouble, worse than McCain and much worse than Romney. The usually very organized and disciplined Republican Party is doing the Headless Chicken dance right now. The polls tell us we may see the largest third party numbers since Ross Perot, and those number are digging into Donald Trump more severely than they are digging into Hillary Clinton.

My next scheduled blog post is after the Democratic convention closes, which I still think of as "too early", but not "crazy too early", like this one.

Clinton vs. Trump:The way too early edition

The title of this post is almost a spoiler, but not quite. The predictive power of the opinion polls taken this far out is weak, but the monthly posts I will make in May, June, July and August are more like snapshots of a hurricane still out over open water. You get a rough idea of where things are going and how strong the trends are, but it's way too soon to predict landfall.

I am going to be tracking the presidential race and the Senate elections. I have no data yet on the Senate and minimal information on Clinton vs. Trump, only polls from thirteen of the fifty-one races so far. Any state that is still a blank slate is assumed to have the same result as 2012 when Obama faced Romney. There are some organizations - most notably the Cook Report - that already have a baseline result different from 2012, and their assumption is the Clinton is farther ahead of Trump than Obama was ahead of Romney. I'm just one guy doing this as a hobby, so I'll keep things as simple as possible.

Here are the two main things I'm going to report in each post until early November.

Feature #1: What to expect hour by hour

This is a new idea and I'm happy with it. I've split up the data into time zones, ignoring the fact that Alaska and Hawaii are not in the Pacific zone, expecting there will be no surprises from our 49th and 50th states. Assume Alaska will go Republican and Hawaii will go Democratic and you are unlikely to go wrong.

Here is what this will look like using the way too early data I have as of this morning.

The hour after polls close on the Eastern Seaboard

Called for Clinton: CT DC DE MA ME MD MI NJ NY OH RI VT
Called for Trump: IN KY SC WV
Too close to call: FL NH PA VA

Expected in first hour: Clinton leads 122 to 33 with 97 still out.

The hour after polls close in the Central time zone

New called for Clinton: FL VA NH PA IL IA MN WI
New called for Trump: GA NC AL AR KS LA MS MO NE OK TN TX

Expected by the time the Mountain time zone starts coming in: Clinton leads 234 to 172.

Here's something I will tell you now that the folks on TV probably won't mention. If Hillary is above 192 before the polls in the Pacific close, she's going to be president. That assumption might change as the year goes on, but the Pacific states should go 84 to 3 Democratic, maybe 78 to 9 if Trump gets lucky and wins Nevada. For any readers I have on the East Coast, you have my permission to go to bed with Hillary at 234 like this.

The hour after the Mountain time zone polls close

New called for Clinton: NM
New called for Trump: AZ ID MY ND NM SD UT WY
Too close to call: CO

Expected by the time the Mountain time zone starts coming in: Clinton leads 243 to 205, 9 too close to call.

The hour after the Pacific polls close
 
New called for Clinton: CA CO HI NV OR WA
New called for Trump: AK

Final total: Clinton 330 Trump 208

As has been true with both of Obama's wins, the numbers from California will likely be the ones that push the Democratic candidate over the threshold.

Yet again, this is NOT A PREDICTION!!!!! This is more like a dry run of what to expect using very sketchy data more than five months out.

Feature #2: The Golden Spike

I'm going to live tweet Election Night and give a running tally on what I call the Golden Spike. The idea is that the states are ranked by the confidence of victory for each candidate and assuming those numbers are reliable, there will usually be one state that will be the median. (It can happen that we get a 269-269 tie, but it's very unlikely.) For example, right now the Golden Spike is in Virginia. There are many pathways to victory, but the most likely single way right now for Trump would be to win all 208 electoral votes I'm assuming he'll win and also pulling off wins in Florida, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Virginia.  

The metaphor of a Golden Spike is not perfect, because unlike the real Golden Spike in the transcontinental railroad, this spike can move during the evening. If any of these states is called early for Clinton, Trump's easiest path to victory changes, becoming more difficult. If for example Pennsylvania gets called for Clinton, Trump would now have to win all the other states listed and Colorado, Nevada and Iowa as well, and the Spike would be in Iowa.

If Clinton loses a state that was considered more likely for her win than Virginia, like for instance Iowa, that could move the Golden Spike closer from Trump.

A useful brag here: Confidence of Victory has done a really good job in the last two elections. One state was incorrectly called in 2008 (Indiana went to Obama when the opinion polls favored McCain) and one state was given toss-up status in 2012, and that state was Florida, which took four days to conclude that Obama beat Romney. Remember of course that this is the final version of my results, not what I say will happen in May.

Some people in the media will use the narrative that we have an exciting horse race this year. As of late May, not so much. Both the wins by George W. Bush were very close in the electoral college, where changing the result in a single state like Florida or Ohio would have elected a Democrat. As we know, that very nearly happened in 2000. In contrast, Obama laid an electoral ass whuppin' on both McCain and Romney. Even in the extremely likely event of Obama losing California, he still would have had more than 270 electoral votes in either race. The preliminary view of 2016 makes it look much more like the last two elections and not much at all like the two elections in 2000 and 2004.

In conclusion, to Democrats reading this: Stay calm and pay attention to people who crunch numbers. Nate Silver may have some egg on his face, but he's not the only guy doing this work. If you ask me, he's not even the best. Of people you might see on TV, Sam Wang from Princeton is much more reliable and from my experience, Wang is also a nicer guy who will actually answer e-mail and tweets.

To Republicans reading this, my best advice right now: You broke it, you bought it.

Indiana

Trump's yuge win last Tuesday makes it much harder to stop him and a win this Tuesday in Indiana would make it nearly impossible. For the Republicans, Indiana is winner take all, the last such primary this month for the GOP. (The Democrats are proportional all the way down the line.) Ted 'The Snake" Cruz is in second according to most polls, though there was one strange outlier that had him ahead by 16. The most likely result according to the polls is a Trump win by single digits, say about 7 or 8. I would not be surprised if Kasich throws in the towel later this week.

Hillary's lead over Sanders is more modest, probably in the 4 to 5 point range. It would certainly count as an upset if either of the front runners lost, a much bigger and more stinging loss if Trump gets beat. The rest of May is mostly Western states and not very large prizes, so barring some dramatic development, I'll probably wait until the big June 7th set of primaries, which is mainly a Western test (California, Montana, New Mexico, South Dakota) with New Jersey just to keep things strange.

Pundits are assuming it's Trump vs. Hillary, and I have no reason to say they are wrong, which is rare for me. Once that happens, it's a question of which party can close ranks the best and get out the vote, or in the case of the Republicans most effectively suppress the vote. This is not to say it looks like a toss-up, because Trump will be hard pressed to win any state Obama carried in 2012. It hardly counts as a prediction to say Trump will continue to be ill-informed and ill-mannered. If I am to go ever so slightly out on a limb without numbers to back me up, only history. People waiting for a bombshell that destroys Hillary, either Benghazi or the e-mail server, are very likely to be disappointed.

This presidential race looks something like an anaconda digesting a pig, long, ugly and inevitable. The more interesting contest will be in the Senate, where the Republicans have to defend 24 seats out of 34 being held. Predicting the House is much harder to do, though the Republicans losing the lower chamber currently looks unlikely. It all depends on how much of a drag Trump is on the ticket.