Hillary Clinton’s odds of winning the presidential election that’s now less than a month away currently stand at an all-time high of 94 percent, according to the Daily Kos Elections model. That’s higher than at any point during her post-Democratic convention bounce. It’s high enough that you can fairly say that it would take a “black swan” event … whether it’s a truly surprising and harmful October Surprise that completely reverses the race, or an unprecedented across-the-boards failure by dozens of different pollsters ... to prevent her from becoming the next president.
What’s really surprising is that’s entirely without any post-”hot mic” polling … i.e., a poll with field dates that extend into this weekend ... having entered our database. (We’ve seen some national polling that meets that criteria, but nothing state-level, which is what we care about.) The rapid rise, instead, is mostly a result of her victory (or if you prefer, Donald Trump’s self-immolation) in the first debate. That debate was two weeks ago, but it took most of a week for any post-debate polls to show up and really took until this most recent weekend for there to be enough of them, in enough states, for their weight to be fully felt. Keep in mind that a week ago, on Monday the 3rd, Clinton’s odds were still at “only” 72 percent, and even on Thursday the 6th, her odds were at 83 percent.
The next question for this coming week is how much Trump’s endorsement of sexual assault continues to drive Clinton’s odds even higher. It’s not a very interesting question, though … there isn’t really anywhere for them to go much higher, and it’s more of an academic question whether her chances end up at, say, 95 percent or 98 percent. It will be interesting to see, in coming weeks, how much higher her projected electoral vote total goes up (currently at 323) and which other states flip from red to blue on the map.
At the end of the day, though, she doesn’t get any extra credit for a bigger EV total, in the form of a “mandate” or anything else. What matters, instead, in terms of whether she actually gets anything done in the coming years is the composition of Congress. That’s where the real importance of the leaked lurid remarks comes. They weren’t the coup de grace for Trump’s campaign (apparently, instead, that was the first debate); instead, they were the signal to Republicans in Congress to begin their chaotic, uncoordinated retreat away from Trump’s smoldering wreckage. Whether Republican Congress members in swing states can successfully escape the toxic cloud will be decisive in whether they can retain control of the Senate and possibly even the House.