New batch of polls put some interesting electoral votes in-play

Another day and another batch of polls has been released that show Arizona and Maine (CD2) may not be as set as they were last week.

A PPP poll (yeah, I know, left leaning) showed Clinton up +1 in a head-to-head matchup in Florida and Trump up +1 if the contest includes Stein and Johnson. We had resisted pushing Florida into toss-up, but the trend in polls is just giving us too much data to ignore. We have requested more detailed demographic weighting information from PPP, but have not heard back at this time.

Maine assigns their electors a bit different than most states. They award two electors to the popular vote and then two congressional districts each get one electoral vote based on their results. CD2 was polled by Emerson and gave Trump a 5 point advantage over Hillary in a 4-way race. It’s only one vote, but Trump needs every one he can get at this time.

Emerson also ran a poll of likely voters in New Jersey and the results are a bit shocking. Among respondents, Hillary Clinton has only a 4 point lead in a poll with a 3.4% margin of error. A finding this close pushed us to move New Jersey from safe Democrat to leaning Democrat. The only concern was that the poll was weighted by 2012 election turnout – with Obama in the election. It is quite possible that Trump is performing even stronger in New Jersey than this poll suggests.

Rhode Island also came up within the margin of error for Trump. With little corroborative data to use, we put RI into the leaning Dem column until we see more data.

So what does all this great information mean?