Donald Trump’s path to 270 electoral votes remains blocked by a number of toss-up states trending toward Hillary Clinton, a new forecast from election analyst Larry Sabato and recent polls show.
Sabato’s “Crystal Ball” continues to show Democrats with 347 electoral votes and Republicans with just 191, which is unchanged since his last projection in March. The only tweaks under the surface since are that Arizona, Georgia and Utah look slightly less favorable to Trump, even though they’re still in his column, and Pennsylvania looks a bit better for the presumptive GOP nominee.
Such a trend is devastating to Trump’s chances in November. The conventional wisdom is that Trump’s most likely path to victory runs through the Rust Belt, with its trove of white, blue-collar voters. Numbers from the Cook Political Report found that those states have reddened in national elections since 1992.
But only Pennsylvania and Ohio come close to being toss-ups, the Crystal Ball projection shows; Michigan and Wisconsin are both still rated “likely” states for Clinton. Other swing states that went red the last time a Republican won the presidency—Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Virginia—all “lean” toward the Democrats.
All told, Trump’s avenue to 270 doesn’t appear to be narrow. It looks practically non-existent.
“Our ratings are premised to a large degree on a belief that we are not going to see dramatic changes in the electoral performance of the states this year,” Sabato and his colleagues Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley write. “In other words, we think the states that have been the most Democratic in recent elections will continue to be among the most Democratic, the most Republican states will continue to be the most Republican, and the states that have voted closest to the national average in recent elections—the swing states—will continue to reflect the national average.”
Right now, the national average has been moving in Clinton’s favor. The RealClearPolitics average of ten June polls have her with a six-point advantage, and only one poll in the last two weeks has shown her winning by any margin less than five.
That reflects the difficulty Trump faces in crucial swing states. Quinnipiac’s most recent swing state poll this week had Ohio and Pennsylvania close, but Clinton up by eight in Florida, which awards 29 electoral votes to the victor. Sabato and company write that such a sizable edge might be exaggerating matters, but Trump’s prospects in those all-important states look grim.
“These three states have voted fairly close to the national average in recent years, so if Clinton’s national lead is around six points, that’s probably about what her lead in these states is as well,” the authors write. “Trump needs to carry at least two of these three electoral vote-rich states to have a path to victory, and in our view he’s an underdog in all three at the moment.”
