Based on the results of the past six US presidential elections, it’s true Trump has an uphill climb – but those results should be treated with caution

After months of claiming that Donald Trump doesn’t have a hope in hell of winning the Republican nomination (facepalm), several sources are now predicting that his hopes of winning the national election are slim. Is this more of the same short-sightedness or is the electoral math really stacked against the New York businessman?

Based on the results of the past six US presidential elections, it’s true that Trump has an uphill climb to get to the White House. But those results should be treated with caution – not least because an assumption that the past can help to accurately predict the future is one reason why Trump’s success has been continually underestimated (and speaking of historical precedents, if Hillary Clinton does secure the Democratic nomination – which now looks very likely – it will be the first time a woman has done so, which might also complicate predictions of voter behavior).

It’s a simple fact of political reality that some states are less competitive battlegrounds than others. In 31 states, the same political party has won the last six presidential elections. Since 18 of those stronghold states are places that Democrats have consistently had victories (19 if you include Washington DC), Trump’s party has a tougher starting point.

To make matters worse for Trump, those “safe” Democratic states together wield much more power – having a combined total of 242 electoral votes. By contrast, the 13 states that have always voted Republican over the past two decades only have 102 electoral votes. Remember, 270 electoral votes is enough to win the White House.

It’s unlikely that either party will spend large amounts of time or resources in states they consider safe. But understanding the battleground in this election requires a little more nuance: of the states that have recently flipped between parties, some will be more competitive than others.



Take Kentucky, for example. Even though the state was won over from the Democrats in 2000, since then, the Republicans have easily won every election by a margin of over 15 percentage points. So, although Kentucky is historically a swing state it probably won’t be part of the 2016 battleground.

It’s an entirely different story in states like Ohio and Florida. Not only has party control changed hands multiple times in those states over the past 20 years, but often victories have been hard fought. In 2004, the Republicans won Ohio by just 2 percentage points. The following election, the Democrats won the state back but by a margin of only 5 percentage points.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Barack Obama campaigns in Ohio in 2012. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

But four years is a long time in US politics, so 2012 results might not be such a great barometer for understanding this election. After all, it was as recently as 2011 that Donald Trump announced that he was switching his affiliation from the Republican to the Independent Party and Hillary Clinton was saying “no, no” when asked if she would run in the 2016 election. Back then, 43% of Americans said they had a favorable opinion of Donald Trump while 66% said the same of Hillary Clinton (an all-time high for the former secretary of state).

Polling today shows that neither candidate is popular. The question, though, is which candidate will be the least unpopular in November 2016, and crucially whether they can be so in the battleground states.

Nationally, Clinton has held an edge on Trump when Americans have been asked the (decreasingly) hypothetical question of who they would vote for in a match-up between the two candidates. However, Clinton’s lead has shrunk from 11 percentage points in late March to just 6.5 percentage points this week.

Few polls have been conducted that look underneath these national averages. That’s partly because state-level polling is very expensive but it’s also because regional analysis six months before a national election is not very accurate.

Unsurprisingly, where polling companies have recently invested their time and resources – Arizona, Florida, Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio and West Virginia – are parts of the country that also appear in the table above as “places to watch”. With the exception of West Virginia (where a poll from May last year suggested Trump would win by 27 percentage points) all of those historic battleground states look like they’ll be closely fought this election too, with neither candidate leading by more than 10 percentage points.

Trump and Clinton can now feel confident about securing their parties’ nominations but they can’t feel so sure about getting the support of these battleground states. The candidates will no doubt seek to understand the demographic makeup of places like Florida and Ohio, asking questions like “have jobs been lost here?”, “what are Medicare enrollment rates?” or “is religion important?” – and tailor their rhetoric in the next six months accordingly. Because without those voters, neither candidate has an easy path to the presidency.