Consider the following tweet from Nate Cohn of the NY Times:
You will note one total outlier, which tends to be the poll cited by the Trump folks, and that is the Investors Business Daily poll showing Trump ahead.
Noting that the Quinnipiac has a Republican lean, that the Fox poll is considered to similarly have a Republican lean, what you are seeing is a consistent pattern of continued movement towards Clinton.
The only one of those live phone call polls taken completely since the final debate is the new ABC poll about which a number of us have written, including me in a piece titled New ABC News poll has Clinton +12 - a somewhat detailed look - Update at end in which I discuss the implications of what we see in the internals of that poll.
Some on the Trump side will argue that Trump does better in automated polls perhaps because some of his supporters do not want to admit to a live person they are voting for him. Now that’s not the strongest argument for him, but even if we grant it, the difference is probably at most 1-2%.
I do not know if any of the polls above use bilingual interviewers. We know that absent that live interviewer polls tend to understate Latino participation, and/or overstate the percentage of Latinos supporting Trump. On a national basis that might only represent 2-3%, but it becomes key in a number of states that are considered to be battlegrounds or are moving in that direction — AZ, NV, GA, FL (I consider CO to be baked).
I happen to think, based on what we saw of the internals of the new ABC poll, where we saw the powerful impact of Trump’s attacking the women coming out against him and the high percentage who view his comments about a “rigged election” as being a making of excuses from a losing candidate, that we have not yet fully seen the impact of what is already out there. We have Trump’s horrid performance at the Al Smith dinner. We have another devastating ridicule of Trump on Saturday Night Live. We have an additional accuser. We have Trump totally stepping on his own message at Gettysburg by continuing to attack women coming out against him and talking about rigged elections. NONE of that is reflected in any of the above polls, except perhaps partially in the new ABC poll.
As bad as these public polls are, what Republicans are seeing in their own state-level polls for gubernatorial and senatorial races may be even worse, and some of that is making it online in tweets by people talking with those Republicans — thus Indiana might be even presidentially, which would guarantee that Evan Bayh takes the Senate seat.
There is increasing evidence that this is moving in the direction of a wave election.
The latest fundraising numbers heavily tilt Democratic.
What we are seeing in voter registration figures helps
What we are seeing in absentee ballot requests/returns and early voting.
The Clinton campaign has the luxury of expanding the map, not only because of more money, but because they have more high value surrogates to deploy.
At the same time as they expand the presidential map, the campaign is now specifically targeting lower level races, most notably Senate races — we have seen the President go after Marco Rubio, Clinton advocate for Katie McGinty, and today we will see the President advocate in the NV Senate race. In fact, the location of surrogate events at this point may be as much about the Senate as it is the electoral votes of the particular state where they occur.
We will have a LOT of polling in the remaining 2+ weeks. It will be hard to fully analyze every poll, national and state-level, but that might not really be necessary if we continue to see a pretty strong pattern of continued trends towards Clinton and Democrats across almost all polls.
Harry Enten of Five ThirtyEight also just appeared on MSNBC. He is saying that the Dems have a pretty good chance of taking back the Senate, noting specifically NH, NV, and — wait for it — MO! He thinks NC Burr might be slightly ahead. He has no idea of PA. For IN public polls show Bayh leading. I presume everyone believes WI and IL are ours.
Enten also points out about the notion of hidden Trump voters that during the primaries Trump usually UNDERPERFORMED his polling numbers, so that public polls may well OVERSTATE his performance on November 8.
So pay attention. Feel energized. Push harder and harder.
We can well make this a wave election.