2016 What if everyone’s wrong? Trump has a path, and if the polls are wrong, it’s wider than thought.

Hillary Clinton leads in most national polls and in enough battleground states to put her on pace to surpass the 270 electoral votes she needs Tuesday to become the next president. But not far beneath the surface, as Donald Trump has narrowed the gap following the late-breaking FBI announcement of a renewed review of emails related to her private server, lurks a question making Democrats squirm in these frenzied final days.

What if the polls are wrong?


And more: What if Clinton’s vaunted data operation and ground game don’t deliver? What if there is, in fact, a “silent majority” of Trump fans? What if Clinton’s banked stash of early votes is insufficient? What if, as President Barack Obama’s former campaign manager David Plouffe not so affectionately describes nervous Democrats, the “bed-wetters” are right?

“Our magnificent, historic movement has surprised the world and defied expectations at every single turn,” Trump told a crowd in Orlando, Florida, this week. “And now, next Tuesday, we will have one more glorious surprise for the pundits, the politicians and the special interests when we win and return the power back to the people.”

It’s an outcome that official Washington — more consumed with potential Clinton Cabinet picks (Biden! Sandberg!), her policy agenda, the battle for the Senate — seems wholly unprepared for.

“I don’t think Washington has ever been in touch with this election,” said longtime Democratic pollster Peter Hart. “I end every speech with the Yogi Berra saying, ‘It ain’t over until it’s over’ and it ain’t over until we get the votes counted.”

While Trump remains decidedly the underdog, his path to 270 is not nonexistent. In the most recent New York Times/CBS News poll, Trump trailed by 3 percentage points, shrunken from 9 points behind only weeks ago.

“The trend lines are clearly going in our direction,” Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said this week on MSNBC.

As Clinton’s margin has eroded in recent days, the political focus has shifted from Democratic boasts of flipping Texas, Arizona, Georgia and Utah to safeguarding Michigan, Wisconsin, Colorado, Virginia, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania.

Averages of the public polls in all those latter Democratic states still show Clinton leading — albeit by tighter margins — which would essentially choke off Trump’s path to the White House.

“We’ve seen this a couple times where Hillary Clinton is leading by 3 to 5. Something happens. Her numbers spike to 10. They drop back down. Everyone wets themselves. Rinse. Repeat,” said Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser to President Obama. “She was never going to win by 10.”

Still, Pfeiffer understood the uneasiness, saying he’s asked about it everywhere he goes. “The consequences of a loss here are much greater than they’d be in a normal year,” he said. “You’re more nervous if you’re playing Russian roulette than flipping a coin.”

Then there is the fact that polls — and polling averages — are not infallible. In 2012, Romney led 20 Florida polls in October and November and Obama led in only seven. Obama won the state. And in 2014, in the battle for the Senate majority, pollsters missed the result in race after race far in excess of the margin of error.

In Virginia, Sen. Mark Warner had led the polling average by nearly 10 percentage points on Election Day. He won by less than 1 point. In Kentucky, Sen. Mitch McConnell won by nearly 15 points, 8 points ahead of the polling average. In Arkansas, Tom Cotton outperformed the polling average by 10 points. In Kansas, Sen. Pat Roberts trailed the polling average on Election Day, and he won by more than 10 points.

Josh Holmes, who served as McConnell’s campaign manager and monitored the map nationwide as Republicans retook the Senate majority that year, heeded caution for those trumpeting the demise of Trump already.

“It’s never over,” he said.

Two years ago, Holmes said, “the environment was improving almost every week as we got closer to Election Day, so what you didn’t know was which way voters would finally break at the polls.”

They all broke Republican.

“You have trends that you can take great confidence in. But two or three or four bad news cycles in a row, some of which you can’t control, changes your trend,” he said.

Trump may have the momentum, but in some battlegrounds it has meant moving him to within the margin of error while still trailing rather than taking an outright lead.

As Monmouth University polling director Patrick Murray put it, “Right now, it still looks like Clinton is still over that [270] mark. But every single domino falling Trump’s way would give him the win.”

Sophisticated campaigns these days rely less on polling alone and more on a combination of surveys and modeling the electorate — predicting who will turn out and how they’ll vote.

Clinton’s data department runs hundreds of thousands of election simulations nightly, and those caused the campaign to withdraw from the Virginia and Colorado airwaves weeks ago (her super PAC withdrew, as well). Now, her campaign has returned to the airwaves there in this final stretch as Trump is buying ads there, too.

Both the type and volume of voters who turn out in midterms and presidential elections are completely different, as tens of millions more people vote when the White House is at stake.

Tony Fabrizio, one of Trump’s pollsters, tweeted a provocative question this week about that. “What if the turnout models are wrong and turnout looks more like 2014 than it does 2012?” Fabrizio asked. For instance, Fabrizio floated the impact if “African-American turnout is down 1 or 2 points (which early vote suggests)?”

Pollsters are dubious a big hidden shift is underway, especially as more than 30 million have voted early, giving a snapshot of the electorate. “I don’t see evidence that turnout is going to be at an all-time low in terms of key Democratic groups turning out,” Murray said.

But every day that the words “FBI,” “email,” and Clinton” continue to be splashed across front pages of websites, newspapers and cable chyrons is another day of concern for Democrats that Trump could somehow be sneaking up on Clinton.

“It’s one of those things where, if your polls cross at this stage, where you have Trump crossing Clinton, you have to ask yourself if they have the organization able to deliver where public opinion is,” Holmes said of the Trump operation. “That is an open question.”