We can only hope:
See this not as something that is happening but a sign of a possible trend which, if backed up by other polls over the next two weeks, could be the story of the 2016 election.
Josh Marshall over at TPM has been looking at the internals of the ABC News 2016 Election Tracking poll, which says:
Likely voters by a vast 69-24 percent disapprove of Trump’s response to questions about his treatment of women. After a series of allegations of past sexual misconduct, the poll finds that some women who’d initially given him the benefit of the doubt have since moved away.
See PDF with full results, charts and tables here.
Fifty-nine percent of likely voters, moreover, reject Trump’s suggestion that the election is rigged in Clinton’s favor, and more, 65 percent, disapprove of his refusal to say whether he’d accept a Clinton victory as legitimate. Most strongly disapprove, a relatively rare result.
He notes that within a week we’ve gone from Clinton + 4 to Clinton + 12. The first is from the ABC/WAPO poll, the second from the ABC Tracking poll. But Marshall believes, from what he can tell, that they are two polls of the same polling shop. He believes what this portends is simply a shift from the standalone poll to a Tracking poll for the last two weeks of the election cycle. He notes that since Trump has been transformed in the public eye into Uncle Grope-Fester, his deficit margin among educated white women has ballooned to 32 points, with an overall lead among white folks of only 4%. Romney’s lead was 20 points at this time in 2012. Translated nationally, this marks a jump from a 4 to 8 point lead for Clinton.
But the real story is in the mysterious mind of the traditional Republican voter, who probably didn’t expect any of this last April, or if they did, is just now coming to terms with what it all means:
But here's the key, the big deal ...
The previous ABC/Post poll found a sharp 12-point decline in enthusiasm for Trump among his supporters, almost exclusively among those who’d preferred a different GOP nominee. Intended participation now has followed: The share of registered Republicans who are likely to vote is down 7 points since mid-October.
Per Marshall’s analysis (and you see the evolution of his thinking on Twitter), this drop in likely Republican voters “appear[s] to be concentrated among non-Trump Republicans who came around to Trump after he won the nomination.” And this is less significant for the Presidential, where Clinton holds a clear lead, than for the downballot races.
Sayeth Marshall:
I'm not sure I've ever seen a drop off in likelihood to vote which is so rapid and so soon before an election. To be fair, this isn't really a number I'm even used to looking for. You don't usually have sharp drop offs like that before an election. People on both sides tend to get more pumped up, more driven to partisan affiliation. Usually you are looking at who's getting their voters more activated.
With numbers of Republican voters apparently resigned to doing something other than voting on election day, such as cleaning the cat box, scrubbing the bathtub or maybe applying that water sealant to the deck, Marshall says that if the polls over the next few days show similar levels of GOP “pre-occupation,” the GOP may very well be looking straight into the Big Wave.
Just something to keep your spirits high.
And GOTV.