Donald Trump’s path to 270 in the Electoral College — the number of votes he needs to be elected president — became smoother this week, but obstacles remain with less than two months to go in the race for the White House.
Trump is now tied with or ahead of Hillary Clinton in several recent reputable national polls. More important is the Republican’s steady gains in the battleground states. Trump is now leading in the RealClearPolitics polling average in three states Barack Obama carried in 2012: Ohio, Florida and Iowa.
An Emerson College poll found Trump leading in Colorado, a state that was thought to be out of the Republicans’ reach this year, especially with the New York businessman at the top of the ticket. Trump’s lead is just outside the margin for error.
Both Monmouth and NBC/Marist came out with polls showing Trump narrowly ahead in Nevada. “The race in Nevada is still tight, but the momentum has swung toward Trump,” said Monmouth polling director Patrick Murray in a statement accompanying the results.
Trump has even begun to cut into Clinton’s lead in Virginia, where her running mate Tim Kaine has been elected senator and governor. Emerson had Clinton up by just 1 point at the beginning of the month. The University of Mary Washington gave her a 3-point lead this week.
Overall, his base of working-class whites seems more excited than the young people, minorities and college-educated suburban whites Clinton needs to turn out, though it’s still no cakewalk.
Holding on to the 24 states Mitt Romney won four years ago and adding Ohio, Florida and Iowa would put Trump at just under 260 electoral votes. That means he could the presidency by picking off some smaller states even if he loses Pennsylvania, which was once seen as central to his White House hopes.
This is good news for Trump for two reasons. One is that Clinton is holding steady with a nearly 6-point lead in the RealClearPolitics average of Keystone State polling. For perspective, that’s bigger than her lead in either Wisconsin or Virginia, two states where it would be a real upset if Trump won.
Secondly, Pennsylvania has been the great white whale for Republicans in presidential elections since Bill Clinton was first elected. Polls show it getting close every four years but it hasn’t actually delivered its electoral votes to the GOP since 1988.
Winning Pennsylvania gives Trump his straightest shot to an electoral majority. But if he can carry Colorado and Nevada in addition to Ohio, Florida and Iowa, he can win without Pennsylvania or Virginia.
None of this gives Trump much margin for error, however. If he loses North Carolina, a close state that was really the only battleground Romney won in 2012, it scrambles his electoral math all over again. The same is true of any Romney state Trump fails to capture.
Even when Trump has been competitive in the battlegrounds, he has underperformed in a number of usually reliable red states. Some polls have shown him with a lackluster lead in Texas, where a combination of Latino backlash and lingering conservative anger over Trump’s nasty campaign against native son Ted Cruz could be depressing his numbers.
Utah has been something of a problem, although recent polls have shown Trump leading by double digits. Libertarian Gary Johnson and independent conservative Evan McMullin are expected to make a play for anti-Trump Republicans in the state. (McMullin lives in Utah himself.)
Arizona, Georgia and even South Carolina have all been states where the public polling looks surprisingly tight, though Trump remains ahead. He could nevertheless be forced to play defense in some of the Romney states he can’t afford to lose.
The dream scenario for Trump is that he holds all the Romney states — in terms of the electoral vote, it doesn’t matter if he wins Utah by 5 points or 50 — takes the aforementioned battlegrounds and perhaps even wins New Hampshire and Maine’s second congressional district.
Trump’s nightmare scenario is that Clinton picks off one or more Romney states and he loses multiple battlegrounds. That’s not too hard to imagine. First, the swing states have a tendency to mostly break one way on Election Day. Second, ,it is not clear many of his current polling leads are strong enough to withstand a vastly superior turnout operation, which Clinton is believed to have (though the Republican National Committee disputes this).
If the reality is somewhere in between, Trump will still need a lot to break his way to become president. This week, however, his math got just a little bit easier.
