Millions of voters will head to the polls Tuesday with the presidency and the Senate majority on the line and both outcomes very much in doubt.
By mid-October, it looked all but certain that Hillary Clinton would be elected president and Democrats would take the Senate. While that scenario remains in play, a late Donald Trump surge plus the tightening of some Senate races has added suspense to the final days of the campaign.
Clinton remains the odds-on favorite to win the White House. She leads by nearly 3 points in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls in a two-way race with Trump. Her margin increases slightly when Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein are factored in.
The Democratic nominee has more paths to 270 electoral votes, the number required to become president. With early voting available in 37 states and the District of Columbia, more than 41 million Americans have already cast their ballots — many of them while Clinton held a more comfortable lead in the polls than she currently has.
That means a lot of the country could wind up like Nevada on Election Day. Trump leads Clinton there by 1.5 points in the RealClearPolitics average. But a surge in early voting has given Clinton a lead that will be difficult for Trump to overcome.
“Trump’s path was nearly impossible, as I have been telling you, before what happened in Clark County on Friday,” observed Nevada political analyst Jon Ralston. “But now he needs a miracle in Vegas on Election Day — and a Buffalo Bills Super Bowl championship is more likely — to turn this around.”
Still, Trump’s narrow path to an Electoral College majority remains alive. As he has gained on Clinton nationally, he has also seen his standing improve in must-win battleground states. He leads in statewide polling averages in Ohio and Iowa, both of which went Democratic in 2012, and also North Carolina, the only swing state that voted for Mitt Romney four years ago — and where early voting trends have been less favorable to Clinton.
Trump and Clinton have traded leads in the public polling in Florida, where Clinton is ahead by just 0.2 percentage points in the RCP averages. Quinnipiac has Clinton up by 1, Trafalgar has Trump leading by 4. In Pennsylvania, Clinton’s average lead is down to 2.4 percentage points.
Polling guru Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight estimates that the reaction to FBI Director James Comey briefly renewing the Clinton email investigation cut Clinton’s national lead in half. Others suggest there were signs that Republicans were coming home to Trump as the shock of the “Access Hollywood” tape faded and he improved his performance in the final two presidential debates.
“Trump is about 3 points behind Clinton — and 3-point polling errors happen pretty often,” Silver notes.
The Republican nominee is doing somewhat better in some blue states than the typical GOP standard-bearer, but not enough to flip them, while underperforming in some reliably red states, though not yet losing them. That’s why Trump’s position is so precarious: he could hold the Romney states and add enough to battlegrounds to win, or he could wind up losing Romney states in an electoral blowout for Clinton.
Clinton is hopeful that high turnout among Hispanics reacting to Trump’s immigration rhetoric will help her win, especially since the other two pillars of Barack Obama’s coalition — African Americans and millennials — appear to be less enthusiastic about her candidacy than Obama’s.
Trump is counting on a big boost in working-class white turnout, including some “hidden voters” who might slip through pollsters’ likely voter screens because they haven’t voted in the past couple of elections. He’ll need it because all signs point to him underperforming among college-educated whites.
While Trump may have an overall edge in voter enthusiasm, he and Clinton are the two least popular major party nominees on record. Both receive net negative ratings from the public, with Trump’s unfavorability being somewhat higher than Clinton’s. That’s one of the reasons the race has often defaulted to a small Clinton lead.
The Senate is even shakier. Democrats need to pick up four seats to reclaim the majority if Clinton wins, five if Trump is elected president. The difference is because Democrats could control the Senate with Vice President Tim Kaine’s tie-breaking vote in a 50-50 split, but would need to win an outright majority if the vice president is Mike Pence.
The Republicans’ odds of keeping the Senate have improved, though they are not safe yet. Rob Portman has what looks like an insurmountable lead over Democratic challenger Ted Strickland in Ohio. Indiana Democrat Evan Bayh has seen the lead in the race to retake his old Senate seat, open due to the retirement of Republican Sen. Dan Coats, slowly disappear. Republican Todd Young led Bayh by 5 points in a recent poll.
In Florida, Sen. Marco Rubio wanted to be president of the United States and out of the Senate either way. Rubio’s presidential ambitions were ended by the Republican voters in his own state, when they voted for Trump by a wide margin instead. Rubio put off his planned retirement and has held a steady lead over Democratic challenger Patrick Murphy.
At the beginning of the year, John McCain was thought to be in danger in Arizona. He’s 80 and being squeezed on both sides by Trump voters who are unhappy with him and Hispanics who are turning out against Trump. But McCain is leading comfortably.
Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson looked like he was all but certain to lose his seat in a rematch against Democratic former Sen. Russ Feingold. Then the highly respected Marquette University Law School poll showed Johnson down by just a single point — a statistical tie. The Republican led among independents by 6 points.
Yet Johnson’s recovery only adds to a list of Senate seats that are toss-ups for the Republicans: Pat Toomey’s in Pennsylvania, Kelly Ayotte’s in New Hampshire, Richard Burr’s in North Carolina and Roy Blunt’s in Missouri. Blunt’s seat was never expected to be competitive and he is actually running behind Trump.
Republicans are also competing for one Democratic-held seat, the one being vacated by retiring Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid in Nevada. Joe Heck has been a strong GOP candidate, but if early voting does in Trump there it likely doesn’t bode well for the Senate race.
Many of these Senate races are taking place in states that are also competitive at the presidential level, a fact that complicated Republican efforts to distance themselves from Trump at his October nadir. If Trump runs strong in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Nevada, even if he doesn’t win, it will help the GOP Senate candidates. If Clinton does well in those states, the Republican senatorial candidates will only be able to run so many points ahead of Trump.
Clinton acknowledged that the public was growing tired of the race in her closing television ad. “I think we can all agree it’s been a long campaign, but tomorrow you get to pick the next president,” she said in a 2-minute spot Monday.
Now she, Trump and most of Capitol Hill must wait for their final verdict.
