Bruce Murphy from Urban Milwaukee makes the case that Wisconsin is unlikely to be competitive in the Presidential race this fall:
The Marquette Law School poll tends to dominate the news when it comes to political prognostications, and its last poll, while it wasn’t great news for Donald Trump, wasn’t horrible. The mid-June poll showed Hillary Clinton led Trump by 42 percent to 35 percent, compared to a bigger lead of 47 percent to 37 percent in March.
The result was a spate of articles suggesting the race was tightening or that both candidates had weaknesses, as a Journal Sentinel headline declared.
But have the fundamental dynamics of the race here really changed? Not really, if you look at Nate Silver’s invaluable FiveThirtyEight website, which collects, weighs and adjusts all polls to come up with a model that projects who will win. Silver is famous for having correctly predicted how every state would vote in past presidential races and his analysis of Wisconsin, taking into account all 14 polls done by nine different polling organizations, shows that little has changed since last November. Trump has never led and Clinton’s margin of victory has always been pretty secure.
Right now Silver’s model shows Clinton with 50.5 percent of the vote and Trump with 41 percent in Wisconsin. He gives Trump just a 14.5 percent chance of winning the state. In short, Wisconsin doesn’t look like much of a swing state, its usual position, for the upcoming election.
For that matter, the national race doesn’t look very close.
Read more from Urban Milwaukee.
