November 3, 2016 at 9:04 PM
Donald Trump is closer to the presidency than he has ever been. He’s risen in key swing states so much in recent days that our tool using current RealClearPolitics averages of every state shows him trailing Clinton just 273-265 in the electoral college.
And yet, his campaign can't help itself. It just released this ridiculous map:
To be clear, this is from a fundraising email, where reality goes to die and outlandish claims about the state of the race are par for the course. But this is even more ridiculous than the ridiculous map the campaign released last week. And it comes when the campaign no longer needs to bend the truth to assure anyone that it has a chance.
Let's list the problems:
1) This map grants Clinton only the bluest of blue states — a grand total of 12 of the 50, in fact. She's got California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Vermont and Washington.
While last week’s map had the Trump campaign granting that Minnesota and New Mexico were blue states, now they regard them as “toss-ups.” Clinton leads by 8 points in Minnesota and as much as double-digits in New Mexico. You could make a case that they aren’t necessarily safe — it’s just a much tougher one than it would be in some of the states this map deems safe for Trump.
2) All of their “toss-ups” clearly favor Democrats right now. In addition to Minnesota and New Mexico, Colorado and Virginia have basically been lost causes for months. And the Trump campaign only recently went hard after Michigan and Wisconsin, where every poll on record shows them trailing.
About the only “toss-up” states where they appear to have a decent shot are New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, but calling them toss-ups is a stretch, at best. (This is where we are contractually required to include a reminder that Pennsylvania hasn’t gone Republican since 1988.)
3) Maine is light red. Okay, we'll grant that it’s hard to characterize Maine on a map, given only one electoral vote is actually at stake in the state’s 2nd Congressional District. And to their credit, they appear to only award him one vote from Maine -- bringing him from 265 to 266 in their count. But the idea that this district favors him, again, isn’t borne out by polling.
4) It assumes that Trump will win Arizona, where the most recent high-quality poll has him up just 1 point. In contrast to the pink states, which the campaign says “show where our hard work has been paying off the most,” Arizona is merely treated as a foregone conclusion.
5) North Carolina and Nevada are pink. You can make an argument that Trump is making headway in other pink states — Florida, Ohio, Iowa — but he hasn't led in one live-caller poll of North Carolina since mid-September, and early voting in Nevada looks very strong for Democrats. If anything, Nevada was looking pretty good for Trump and is now less so, though he could still win it.
The Trump campaign has bent the truth regularly during this campaign when it comes to both the facts and the polling. And apparently even with the presidency in reach, they can’t kick the habit.
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