Trump’s potential path to the White House

When Donald Trump announced he would be running for US president in June 2015, many thought it was a joke. 

Just over a year later, the maverick businessman is the official Republican candidate and what at first looked like an impossible feat has now turned into a nightmare for many in America and abroad. 

While Trump has been branded a clown, a homegrown demagogue, a narcissist, insane, racist and even a fascist, he enjoys wide support and a Republican victory is far from impossible. 

Ultimately it will boil down to which candidate can mobilise most supporters and inspire most people to go out to vote, and after two terms in office it will take a gargantuan effort from the Democrats to recreate the enthusiasm seen in the past two elections, which saw Barack Obama win on the back of huge popular support. 

Obama has recently warned Democrats to be “worried until all those votes are cast and counted because you know, one of the dangers in an election like this is that people don’t take the challenge seriously. They stay home. And we end up getting the unexpected.”

Up to a few weeks ago, Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton held a healthy lead in the polls but following the shootings of police officers in Dallas and the terrorist attacks in France and Germany, which potentially play into Trump’s gloomy narrative, the Republican candidate has a slender lead in the poll averages.

But as shown in last year’s election in the UK and the 2012 US election, pollsters do not always get it right and with Clinton expected to regain her lead following this week’s Democratic convention, all is set for a close result. 

With polling just 100 days away, anything can happen between now and then and a number of indicators do not bode well for the Democrats and Hillary Clinton. 

Voters want change

When voters demand change, they normally overlook the new candidate’s shortcomings and the experienced candidate is subject to more scrutiny. 

One of Trump’s strongest arguments is that he represents change and Clinton does not. The former First Lady is widely seen as the establishment’s candidate and November’s election is taking place in a year of unprecedented insurgency.

Trump is definitely not establishment and Clinton’s rival in the Democratic primaries, Bernie Sanders – who describes himself as a democratic socialist – enthused millions of young voters and won over 45% of pledged delegates. 

Obama’s lukewarm job approval combined with mediocre economic growth and second-term fatigue point towards a close race. 

Moreover in the past 65 years, only one party has won three consecutive terms. 

According to the trend, after two terms in office the Democrats are likely to lose power and normally the electorate seeks change whoever the candidates are. 

Over the past 65 years, only the Republicans managed to win a third consecutive term. That was in 1988, when Republican George H.W. Bush followed Ronald Reagan’s two-term presidency. 

In this map, Republican nominee Donald Trump (red) wins five key swing states: Nevada, Iowa, Ohio, New Hampshire and North Carolina, giving him an equal number of electoral college votes as Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. A tie could lead to a Trump presidency as the decision will be down to the at present Republican-dominated House of Representatives. Source: New York Times

Trump won big in the primaries 

Some US political analysts believe that primary votes have no bearing on general elections, but others base their predictions on primary election results. 

Generally, the party with the stronger primary candidate wins the general election and this year Trump won more primaries than Clinton. 

Trump won 35 states to Clinton’s 29 and although Clinton won more votes – 15.8 million to Trump’s 13.3 million – the Republican primaries were more crowded. 

While Clinton only had Sanders to beat, 16 Republican candidates tried to outsmart and outmanoeuvre Trump but none of the candidates – including GOP stalwarts Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio – could stop his juggernaut.

Based on these results, the Primary Model designed by Helmut Norpoth – a political science professor at Stony Brook University in New York – predicts that Trump will defeat Clinton with 87% certainty.

Win probabilities favour Trump 

Political analyst and statistician Nate Silver’s latest forecast sees Trump enjoying a three percentage point-greater chance of beating Clinton if the election were held today. 

According to Silver’s FiveThirtyEight – a website that focuses on opinion poll analyses – Trump’s current likelihood of winning stands at 51.6%, compared to Clinton’s 48.4%. 

The win probabilities, or ‘now-cast’ results, are generated by simulating the election 20,000 times, which produces a distribution of possible outcomes for each state. 

However, FiveThirtyEight’s polls-plus model, which is a forecast based on polls, the economy and historical data, gives Clinton a 61.7% chance of winning and in his latest article Silver says that if Clinton exits the conventions in the same position that she entered them she would remain the favourite, “but a long way from a sure thing.” 

A tie would see Trump elected President 

FiveThirtyEight estimates that the Republican nominee has a higher chance of losing the popular vote but win the Electoral College than Clinton. 

US Presidents are elected through the electoral college with a candidate winning a state’s electoral college votes if the candidate gets the majority of popular votes cast in that state.

Bigger states, such as California, Texas and Florida, have more electoral college votes, and the winner needs an overall majority of those votes to become president. 

The FiveThirtyEight forecast based on poll averages shows Clinton winning the popular vote, but winning the presidency is a state-by-state game. 

Presidents are not popularly elected, as the world was shocked to learn when Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000 only to lose to George W. Bush in the electoral college. 

In total, there are 538 electoral college votes, meaning 270 are theoretically needed. But Trump only needs to win 269 electoral college votes while Clinton will need to win 270.

With both candidates neck-to-neck, a tie is possible and if Clinton and Trump both get 269 votes then the House of Representatives selects the President.

And this spells trouble for Clinton because the House is – and will almost certainly remain – controlled by the Republicans.

Demographics

The largest obstacle for Trump in the November election is demographics. 

After 2012, the Republican Party put together a plan to expand its appeal to non-white voters, but Trump might have blown this plan away with his anti-immigration and anti-Muslim rhetoric. 

According to a national NBC/WSJ poll taken in April, 69% of women, 79% of Latinos, and 88% of African Americans are negatively disposed toward Trump. 

On the other hand, Clinton wins those groups by wide margins: women choose Clinton over Trump by 15 points, Hispanics by 37 points and African-Americans by an overwhelming 75 points. 

However, not all is rosy for Clinton – seen as the representative of the old guard –  who is hugely unpopular, and nearly 70% of all voters see her as untrustworthy and dishonest. 

In the Republican primaries, Trump’s support primarily came from white men without a college degree but while white voters without a degree made up 66% of the electorate in 1980, in the last election this went down to 36%. 

But nonetheless, Trump’s best chance of winning the election is to take away white working-class Democrats from Clinton in the swing states. 

On the other side of the fence, Clinton is aiming at winning over well-educated and non-white Republicans who might be disenchanted with Trump’s antics. 

While Clinton needs to up her game in convincing people to get out and vote, she has an easier job at hand because unlike the Republicans, her voting base is more united. 

Her only concern comes from the small but potentially pivotal number of voters to her left who are still bitter over the way the Democratic party handled the primaries in which she beat Sanders. 

During last week’s convention in Philadelphia, a number of Sanders supporters booed Clinton and held up ‘Bernie or Bust’ placards. 

Bernie’s supporters are mostly young and left-wing liberals who will most probably come around and vote for Clinton, albeit holding their noses. 

The same cannot be said about Trump, who will effectively need to win over reluctant Republicans while targeting white working class Democrats and non-whites. 

This is especially true for the swing states, including Pennsylvania, which is set to be the most prized state alongside Florida.

In the 11 battleground states, Colorado, Virginia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin currently go to Clinton, while Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio and Iowa would go to Trump, according to the latest FiveThirtyEight projections. 

If Trump wins Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida he’d be on the cusp of victory but if he loses Pennsylvania he will have a Herculean task at hand as he would need to win Ohio, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Iowa, and Nevada to make up for the loss.

None of this should be taken as a prediction of a Trump or Clinton victory but the Republican nominee is anything but an underdog.