Trump Closing the Gap in Virginia

Eleven days out from election day and frankly the preference polls are becoming less and less important we now are fully engaged in attempting to build a winning electoral college delegate path to 270 electors. The popular vote tabulation can be deceiving at this point and sometimes useless for example a half million more votes secured in a state where the candidate already controls the majority of the elector delegates is meaningless as would be a winner take all state like Virginia where Clinton appears to have a solid delegate hold but Trump is showing some preference upside but still is unlikely to capture Virginia’s 13 delegates.

At this point the issue is what are the number of possible state winning combinations to the 270 delegate count each candidate reasonable has to secure the nomination? The Democrats have always had a distinct advantage in this state delegate count process and will again this year as well, as it looks to me, that Hillary has around a 2/1 combination upside to secure the nomination.

Does this mean Trump will lose, of course not, but it does mean the delegate path he must achieve is far more restrictive and unforgiving then Clinton’s. Trump MUST win the delegate count in FL,OH,GA,NC,AZ to have any shot at the goal and his alternatives to back fill lets say NC’s 15 delegates is far more challenging then his Democratic opponent’s combinations.

The one major difference this year is that overall the polling has been so bad when not outright corrupted that these combination possibilities may be based more on fabricated projections then hard data. If that is the case no one really has a clue what the “true” vote baselines are for either candidate and big surprises could be in the offing. Remember you can win the popular vote but still lose the election like in 2000 when Al Gore won the popular vote but lost the election to George Bush.