Nate Silver Election Update: Polls Show Pennsylvania Back In Clinton’s Firewall [View all]

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http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-polls-show-pennsylvania-back-in-clintons-firewall/

Election Update: Polls Show Pennsylvania Back In Clinton’s Firewall

By Nate Silver

Filed under 2016 Election
At FiveThirtyEight, we generally prefer state polls to national polls. So far, though, we haven’t had much of them to work with. If you’re getting dozens of national polls every week, but just a smattering of state-level surveys — and that’s what we’ve been getting — you’re better off inferring what’s going on in the states from the trend in national polls, rather than the other way around.

For example, Hillary Clinton has gone from having roughly a 3 or 4-percentage-point lead over Donald Trump in national polls in early July to more like an 8-point lead now. Therefore, we’d expect her to gain perhaps 4 or 5 points in polls of Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio and other swing states if polls were taken in those states now, compared to the previous versions of those polls conducted a month ago.

On Tuesday, we finally got a bunch of state polls to test the theory — three polls each from Quinnipiac University and Marist College. And, in fact, the new data mostly confirms our hypothesis, although with some caveats. Clinton gained an average of 4 percentage points across the six surveys. The clearest trend toward Clinton is in Pennsylvania, which is now part of her path of least resistance to 270 electoral votes. Here are the new surveys:

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