Recent News

Donald Trump’s campaign has spent more on hats than on polling

I don’t think there’s a data point that better captures the weirdness of this presidential election cycle than the following:

According to the Federal Election Commission filings, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has spent $1.8 million on polling from June 2015 through September of this year (the most recent month for which data are available). The report also lists $3.2 million spent on hats.

“Hillary, number one!” says Andy Santiago, who moved to Florida from Puerto Rico nine months ago in search of a job. He gives a thumbs-up with his left hand, stuck in a latex food-preparation glove, and keeps his right hand on the bulky sandwich roll he is loading with cheese and meat at Piocos Chicken.

Santiago does not speak the language well enough to detail his political views in English, so he repeats himself: “Hillary, number one!”

Earlier this month, I wrote a story outlining the extremely narrow but not impossible path that Evan McMullin could take to the White House, and since then, McMullin has become a genuinely hot topic. Nate Silver followed up with a post about how our forecast model is handling Utah. And we’ve talked about how McMullin’s chances of being the first third-party or independent candidate to win a state since 1968 may turn out to be one of the last cliffhanger results in this race.

Trump confronts Rust Belt rejection

Donald Trump once looked capable of turning the Rust Belt red.

Now, two weeks before Election Day, his best hope is to turn it a lighter shade of blue. His prospects have dwindled down to just one industrial swing state — Ohio — and even that is no longer the comfortable bet for Trump it appeared to be as recently as a month ago.

GOP’s early vote worries mount

Early voting returns continue to paint a bleak picture for Donald Trump.

In Nevada, where early in-person voting began on Saturday, Democratic voters cast 23,000 more ballots than Republicans as of Tuesday afternoon, good for a 15-percentage-point edge in the nearly 150,000 ballots cast. (Mail in and absentee ballots narrow the gap slightly).

Florida spirals away from Trump

From polling to early voting trends to TV ad spending to ground game, Donald Trump’s Florida fortunes are beginning to look so bleak that some Republicans are steeling themselves for what could be the equivalent of a “landslide” loss in the nation’s biggest battleground state.

Trump has trailed Hillary Clinton in 10 of the 11 public polls conducted in October — according to POLITICO’s Battleground States polling average, Clinton has a 3.4 point lead. Even private surveys conducted by Republican-leaning groups show Trump’s in trouble in Florida, where a loss would end his White House hopes.

Pence to make late campaign visit to Utah

With less than two weeks until the election, Mike Pence will be campaigning Wednesday in Utah, a state that last voted for a Democrat for president in 1964.

The Salt Lake City rally was announced Monday evening. The move, so late in the campaign, underscores the danger of a landslide now facing Donald Trump. Recent Utah polls show Trump in a dead heat in the state not just with Hillary Clinton but with independent conservative candidate Evan McMullin.