Quinnipiac polls out this morning show Donald Trump in a statistical tie with Hillary Clinton in Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio. This represents an improvement in Trump’s position in Florida compared to the previous Quinnipiac poll and at least steadiness in his standing in Pennsylvania and Ohio.
Quinnipiac’s Peter Brown attributes Trump’s somewhat improved standing to the Clinton email case. That certainly seems plausible. Yes, FBI Director James Comey did recommend that Clinton not be indicted.
But the spectacle of Attorney General Loretta Lynch meeting with Bill Clinton on her official plane on the tarmac in Phoenix airport, combined with Comey’s clear description of how Clinton lied and violated the law, has clearly struck many voters, not all of them Republicans, as outrageous.
Polls have shown majorities, including substantial numbers of Democrats, saying that she should have been indicted.
Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio together have 67 electoral votes. Barack Obama carried all three states in 2012: Florida by 1 percent, Pennsylvania by 5 percent and Ohio by 3 percent. If he had lost all three, he would have had 265 electoral votes and Mitt Romney would have been elected president.
All three states have populations that are older than the national average and less likely to be college-educated — and Trump has tended to run significantly better with older than younger voters and with non-college-graduate whites than college-graduate whites.
These states probably represent better targets for Trump than target states like Virginia and Colorado, with younger and more college-educated populations.
The subgroup results in each of the three states show Clinton ahead only among voters under 30, and shows that her numbers among young voters fall significantly when they are offered the choices of Gary Johnson and Jill Stein.
Young voters’ level of interest in this election is far lower than in past elections. All of which suggests that Clinton will have a hard time matching Obama’s margin among young voters as a percentage of the total electorate.
Quinnipiac has a high A- rating from the fivethirtyeight.com website, and its results seem to have a slight Republican tilt in this electoral cycle, something you may want to keep in mind in evaluating these results.
