During the Republican convention in Cleveland, I found myself talking with a GOP operative involved with the Trump campaign. Unprompted, he laid out two scenarios for how this election could work out. In scenario one, Trump gets a rather surprising, Brexit-esque surge that propels him to victory. In the second, Trump gets wiped out, winning only the deep-red states.
That less-than-bullish assessment was him trying to spin me, which was interesting enough. But with both conventions over and the general election campaign having begun in earnest, it's worth thinking about his second scenario, the one where Trump loses big.
With less than 100 days to go until Election Day, Hillary Clinton should be considered the heavy favorite to win. Polls will go up in down over the next few months, and Trump will periodically hold a lead in national polls. However, when we consider the unforgiving realities of the Electoral College, we see how hard it will be for Trump to win, and how easy it is to imagine him getting buried.
The Daily Beast's Mike Tomasky made the case for a Clinton landslide in June, and while Trump's numbers have improved a bit since then, the math still decidedly favors a Hillary win. Take the Suffolk University poll that came out last week that showed Clinton leading by by nine points in Pennsylvania at a time when Trump should have been enjoying a cushy convention bounce. And while Pennsylvania is a must-win for Trump, it's not for Clinton. She can become president without it, and he can't.
If Trump wins Pennsylvania, there's a good chance he'll win Ohio as well, and maybe even Michigan and Wisconsin. This is the scenario Michael Moore has been using to scare liberals the past few weeks, and it makes sense in some ways: if Trump's message is tailored specifically for anyone, it's for downwardly mobile whites in the Rust Belt. Should he sweep all four of those states, that will give him 64 Electoral votes, which is exactly the number President Obama won by last time.
But Clinton is leading in Pennsylvania -- a Marist/NBC poll last week found the same thing that Suffolk did -- and a post-convention bounce for her could take the state out of contention. Wisconsin, for a whole host of rather esoteric demographic reasons, is not really Trump country, and gave Ted Cruz his last big win during the primary. They're tied in Michigan and Ohio (CBS has Clinton with small leads in both) but if those Pennsylvania numbers correct, it's reasonable to assume that the Rust Belt uprising Trump needs won't materialize.
Another flaw with the Moore hypothesis is that it assumes Trump will hold on to everything Romney won. There's not a lot of reason to assume he will, which is where we start getting into landslide territory.
As Tomasky noted, deep-red Utah keeps flashing blue. The polls there keep showing a struggling Trump, presumably because of the well-known Mormon antipathy toward him. Georgia, meanwhile, will have an electorate that's 40 percent non-white this cycle, which is good news for Clinton, and make give Democrats a chance to break the GOP stranglehold on the South. And a June Zogby poll in Kansas -- a state that last voted Democratic in 1936 -- indicated even it could be up for grabs.
Are any of those states likely to go blue in November? Well, no -- landslides a la 1984, when Ronald Reagan came within a few thousand votes of winning all 50 states, probably can't happen in a country this dug-in and polarized, so it's a safe bet that the reddest corners of the country will stay red.
However, a state like North Carolina, which Romney returned to the Republican column after Obama snatched a victory there in 2008, could easily vote for Hillary, particularly now that the Fourth Circuit just struck down their voter ID law. If it does, Trump could sweep the Rust Belt and still lose.
Any way you look at it, the only way for Trump to win in November is to pull off a stunning high wire act. He needs to win states that Republicans haven't won in decades in addition to swing states and everything Romney won last time. And he needs to do it all with a turnout operation that will pale in comparison to the Democrats.
Trump can still win. There's just not much reason right now to expect he will.
Commentary: Why Hillary will probably win
By Will Rahn
/ CBS News
During the Republican convention in Cleveland, I found myself talking with a GOP operative involved with the Trump campaign. Unprompted, he laid out two scenarios for how this election could work out. In scenario one, Trump gets a rather surprising, Brexit-esque surge that propels him to victory. In the second, Trump gets wiped out, winning only the deep-red states.
That less-than-bullish assessment was him trying to spin me, which was interesting enough. But with both conventions over and the general election campaign having begun in earnest, it's worth thinking about his second scenario, the one where Trump loses big.
With less than 100 days to go until Election Day, Hillary Clinton should be considered the heavy favorite to win. Polls will go up in down over the next few months, and Trump will periodically hold a lead in national polls. However, when we consider the unforgiving realities of the Electoral College, we see how hard it will be for Trump to win, and how easy it is to imagine him getting buried.
The Daily Beast's Mike Tomasky made the case for a Clinton landslide in June, and while Trump's numbers have improved a bit since then, the math still decidedly favors a Hillary win. Take the Suffolk University poll that came out last week that showed Clinton leading by by nine points in Pennsylvania at a time when Trump should have been enjoying a cushy convention bounce. And while Pennsylvania is a must-win for Trump, it's not for Clinton. She can become president without it, and he can't.
If Trump wins Pennsylvania, there's a good chance he'll win Ohio as well, and maybe even Michigan and Wisconsin. This is the scenario Michael Moore has been using to scare liberals the past few weeks, and it makes sense in some ways: if Trump's message is tailored specifically for anyone, it's for downwardly mobile whites in the Rust Belt. Should he sweep all four of those states, that will give him 64 Electoral votes, which is exactly the number President Obama won by last time.
But Clinton is leading in Pennsylvania -- a Marist/NBC poll last week found the same thing that Suffolk did -- and a post-convention bounce for her could take the state out of contention. Wisconsin, for a whole host of rather esoteric demographic reasons, is not really Trump country, and gave Ted Cruz his last big win during the primary. They're tied in Michigan and Ohio (CBS has Clinton with small leads in both) but if those Pennsylvania numbers correct, it's reasonable to assume that the Rust Belt uprising Trump needs won't materialize.
Another flaw with the Moore hypothesis is that it assumes Trump will hold on to everything Romney won. There's not a lot of reason to assume he will, which is where we start getting into landslide territory.
As Tomasky noted, deep-red Utah keeps flashing blue. The polls there keep showing a struggling Trump, presumably because of the well-known Mormon antipathy toward him. Georgia, meanwhile, will have an electorate that's 40 percent non-white this cycle, which is good news for Clinton, and make give Democrats a chance to break the GOP stranglehold on the South. And a June Zogby poll in Kansas -- a state that last voted Democratic in 1936 -- indicated even it could be up for grabs.
Are any of those states likely to go blue in November? Well, no -- landslides a la 1984, when Ronald Reagan came within a few thousand votes of winning all 50 states, probably can't happen in a country this dug-in and polarized, so it's a safe bet that the reddest corners of the country will stay red.
However, a state like North Carolina, which Romney returned to the Republican column after Obama snatched a victory there in 2008, could easily vote for Hillary, particularly now that the Fourth Circuit just struck down their voter ID law. If it does, Trump could sweep the Rust Belt and still lose.
Any way you look at it, the only way for Trump to win in November is to pull off a stunning high wire act. He needs to win states that Republicans haven't won in decades in addition to swing states and everything Romney won last time. And he needs to do it all with a turnout operation that will pale in comparison to the Democrats.
Trump can still win. There's just not much reason right now to expect he will.
In:- Hillary Clinton
- Donald Trump
Will Rahn is a political correspondent and managing director, politics, for CBS News Digital.
More from CBS News