Clinton’s narrow edge

According to an insightful analysis at FiveThirtyEight.com, Democrat Hillary Clinton remains positioned to win the White House - barely. From the article:

Clinton’s Leading In Exactly The States She Needs To Win

Here at FiveThirtyEight, our favorite election-related chart is what we officially call the “winding path to 270 electoral votes” and unofficially call the snake. Designed by my colleague Aaron Bycoffe, it lines the states up from most favorable for Hillary Clinton (Hawaii, Maryland) to best for Donald Trump (Wyoming, Alabama) based on the projected margin of victory in each one. The snake is bisected by a line indicating 269 electoral votes: cross this line — meaning you get 270 electoral votes — and you win the election.

Right now, Clinton is over the line by exactly one state. As of this writing, that state — what we also call the tipping-point state — is New Hampshire. But a group of states are closely lumped together, and Pennsylvania, Colorado and Wisconsin have all taken their turn as the tipping-point state in recent weeks.

If she wins all those states and everything toward the blue end of the snake, Clinton would finish with 272 electoral votes, even assuming she loses the 2nd Congressional District of Maine. (Maine and Nebraska split their electoral votes by congressional district.) That’s two more than she needs to win the election.

But in different ways, that both understates and overstates how precarious Clinton’s position is. It understates it because Clinton has no margin to spare. Clinton’s polling has been somewhere between middling and awful in most of the other swing states lately, and they all at least lean toward Trump at the moment, narrowly in some cases (such as Florida) and more clearly in others (such as Iowa). If Clinton loses any of the states on the blue side of the snake without picking anything up on the red side, she’ll be stuck on 269 electoral votes or fewer.

The entire article is a must-read for anyone wanting to understand just how tight the race could be.