Among states that are considered safe beyond question for Republicans, Texas comes to mind at the forefront. Since 1952, Texas has only broken for a Democrat four times, and not at all since 1980. That’s 36 years of straight GOP voting.
How bad is Trump? Bad enough that FiveThirtyEight gives Clinton nearly a 17 percent chance of taking the state. Of the latest three polls, Trump’s lead has narrowed–from 1 to 4 points.
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Currently, using their polls-only model, FiveThirtyEight gives Trump the edge, 49.5 percent to 43.7 for Clinton, with Gary Johnson pulling in 5.1 percent. That’s adjusted to include a wild guess on how many will write in Evan McMullin. That’s the worst performance for a GOP candidate in the Lone Star State since Bob Dole in 1996.
It’s bad enough that Nate Silver wrote “Trump will probably win Texas.” That’s Silver’s italics. He went on:
But to put that in perspective, Texas is closer than Pennsylvania right now (where Clinton leads by 7 to 8 points). And Clinton is more likely to win Texas than Trump is to win the election, at least according to the polls-only model, which puts Trump’s overall chances at 12 percent.
This is the part where Kellyanne Conway bangs her head repeatedly into the wall, and most Republicans pull great handfuls of their own hair from their heads in frustration. Trump himself just denies reality.
.@realDonaldTrump: "Even though we’re doing pretty well in the polls, I don’t believe the polls anymore." (Pinning this tweet.)
— Jeremy Diamond (@JDiamond1) October 18, 2016
Before Trump clinched the nomination, we here at The Resurgent had warned Trump will Make America Blue Again. Most of Clinton’s gains have been in red states, while Trump has failed to turn a single blue state to himself. Erick wrote this in March:
The problem now, as Trump appears more and more likely to be the Republican nominee, is again the data. This time it is not Trump skeptics arguing about the data. It is Trump supporters doing so. They find themselves in the ironic position of arguing that the very same data set that showed Trump’s rise also shows he cannot beat Hillary Clinton. They want the first half of the data to be true, while hoping the other half of the very same data is false.
The data does not work that way. The polls that showed Trump winning the Republican nomination also show that he cannot beat Clinton. In nineteen of the twenty past polls, Trump consistently trailed Clinton by around eight points.
Just the fact that Trump could lose Texas is proof that he should have never been the nominee. Everything his supporters believe is simply magical thinking and tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory.
Fail.