Presidentvalet 2016 (USA)

We’ll have our final survey out on Monday, but the latest People’s Pundit Daily (PPD) Sunshine State Battleground Poll finds Mr. Trump leading Mrs. Clinton in a four-way matchup by 3 points, 48% to 45%, with both Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Party candidate Dr. Jill Stein flat at 4% and 2%, respectively. That came after the Bloomberg Politics Poll conducted by Selzer & Co. that found Mr. Trump with a 2-point lead.

In both polls, Mr. Trump carried independents, a group that Mr. Obama carried by 3 points in an election he only managed to win by 0.4%, or less than 70,000 votes. We understand that other polls contradict our own poll and Ms. Selzer’s, but I would argue that the other polls are based on models that mirror the electorate Mr. Obama enjoyed, which clearly is not the case in 2016.

To put it nicely, the PPD Poll and Bloomberg Poll make no assumptions about the electorate and mold the data to those assumptions, like other pollsters. We ask the electorate what it will look like, we don’t tell it what it will look like. Mr. Obama won the black vote almost monolithically and Mr. Trump continues to flirt with touching the low double-digits, coming much closer to the levels reached by President George W. Bush in 2004.

Bottom line: Donald Trump is in a far better position to carry the state of Florida than Mitt Romney was in 2012 before Election Day. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton does not have the large advantage that Mr. Obama enjoyed and lags behind his performance among demographic groups that are key to a Democratic candidate’s chances of carrying the ever important swing state of Florida.

Could Mrs. Clinton still carry the state? Sure. But independents would have to break her way, the crossover vote would have to move her way en masse (only one outlier found that), and Democrats would have to excite the black vote closer to Obama levels. Until we see evidence of that, Florida continues to LEAN TRUMP on the PPD Election Projection Model.