The Bottom Could Fall Out For Trump
By Nate Silver
OCT 8, 2016 AT 4:16 PM
Let’s not naively insist on taking a wait-and-see approach regarding the events of the past 24 hours. The revelation of a tape from 2005 in which Donald Trump was caught making a number of lewd comments about women, and seemed to condone unwanted sexual contact toward women, is bad news for Trump. (#Analysis.) It’s not going to help Trump to become president in a country in which 53 percent of voters are women.
The story has broken through the news cycle in a big way. Since Friday afternoon, Google searches for Trump are somewhere around four times as high as their already-insanely-high levels — in line with the sort of spike that usually occurs around a debate.
But if we knew on Friday night that this would be a big story, it’s become an even bigger story throughout the day today (Saturday) as dozens of GOP elected officials have either repudiated Trump, or unendorsed him, or called for him to resign his position at the top of the ticket. Trump had unusually low levels of support from these “party elites” to begin with, but we’d usually seen only a few prominent Republicans repudiate him at a time after past controversies. Now, the floodgates have opened, and the whole party is fleeing him. We’ve never seen anything like this in a modern American election campaign. Republicans in 1996 may have given up on Bob Dole to concentrate on saving the Congress, but they weren’t calling for Dole to drop out 30 days before the election.
My view of this general election — both how the FiveThirtyEight forecast models see the race and how I see it personally — is that it’s characterized by high volatility and high uncertainty. Those two things go together, although they’re not quite the same.
By volatility, I mean that the polls have been relatively responsive to news events. At various occasions, Hillary Clinton has been ahead by as few as 1 or 2 percentage points over Trump, or by as much as 8 to 10 points. The fluctuations are a lot larger than what we saw in 2012:
more:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-bottom-could-fall-out-for-trump/
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