To understand the strength of Clinton’s current position, let’s take a look at the most common combinations of states that our model is generating. In other words, there are certain permutations that are much more common than others. You don’t see a lot of permutations where, say, Clinton wins Colorado and Pennsylvania but loses Hawaii; all the variations in the most common permutations happen within the major swing states.

You may be getting tired of hearing me say it, but the easiest path for a Clinton victory has, for many months, been by winning Colorado, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Virginia (and Michigan and Wisconsin, if you consider those to be swing states). That’s an ugly victory (only 273 electoral votes), but it’s a win all the same. And Clinton’s overall odds never fell below 60 percent, in large part because her odds always stayed over 60 percent, individually, in all of these states.

However, her odds are over 90 percent in all of those states now, the lowest being 94 percent in Colorado. (You may have noticed that her overall odds tend to closely track her odds in the “pivot point” state, which is the state that, if you order all the states from bluest to reddest, is the one that puts her over the top at 270. Since we started doing the model, it’s usually been Colorado, and that’s still the case today.)

So, in all of the 10 most common permutations that we got on our model run on Sunday night, Clinton wins not just all the blue states (including the ones that have made us a little nervous at various points, like Maine or New Mexico), but also those six swing states as well. Maybe more remarkably, she even manages to win Florida in all 10 of the most common permutations. (Clinton currently wins 80 percent of Florida simulations, thanks to a 46-42 lead in our polling averages of the Sunshine State.)

1. Clinton wins Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Wisconsin; Trump wins Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, Ohio (323 EVs; 1.93 percent of all simulations) 2. Clinton wins Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Wisconsin; Trump wins Arizona, Georgia, Iowa (341 EVs; 1.77 percent of all simulations) 3. Clinton wins Colorado, Florida, Michigan, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Wisconsin; Trump wins Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio (302 EVs; 1.42 percent of all simulations) 4. Clinton wins Colorado, Florida, Michigan, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Wisconsin; Trump wins Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, Nevada, Ohio (317 EVs; 1.35 percent of all simulations) 5. Clinton wins Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Wisconsin; Trump wins Arizona, Georgia (347 EVs; 1.18 percent of all simulations) 6. Clinton wins Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Wisconsin; Trump wins Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio (308 EVs; 1.15 percent of all simulations) 7. Clinton wins Colorado, Florida, Michigan, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Wisconsin; Trump wins Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, Nevada (335 EVs; 1.11 percent of all simulations) 8. Clinton wins Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Wisconsin; Trump wins Georgia, Iowa, Ohio (334 EVs; 1.10 percent of all simulations) 9. Clinton wins Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Wisconsin; Trump wins Arizona, Iowa, Ohio (339 EVs; 1.10 percent of all simulations) 10. Clinton wins Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Wisconsin; Trump wins Arizona, Georgia, Ohio (329 EVs; 1.08 percent of all simulations)

On top of all the “firewall” states and Florida, which she wins each time in the 10 most frequent permutations, you can also see that the list of the top 10 permutations has Clinton winning North Carolina in 8 of the top 10 simulations and Nevada in 7 of them. (She has 67 percent odds overall in North Carolina, and 63 percent in Nevada, which is why she wins those states in a majority of simulations.)

Ohio and Iowa are more troublesome; she wins Ohio in 3 simulations and Iowa in 2 simulations. (Clinton, however, is up to 44 percent odds in Ohio, her best showing there in many weeks. Literally just one more percent in Ohio means that they’ll move up from light-red to gray on our map.) Finally, she picks off Arizona and Georgia, the closest of the red states and the likeliest to flip in case things really go south for Trump, in one simulation each. (Clinton currently is at 33 percent odds in Iowa, 31 in Arizona, and 24 in Georgia.)

If you’re wondering what the most common scenario where Donald Trump wins is, you’ll have to scroll way down the list. It’s the 68th most common permutation! Several weeks ago, though, this was a much more prevalent combination.

68. Clinton wins Michigan, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Wisconsin; Trump wins Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio (264 EVs; 0.24 percent of all simulations)

As you can see, this is only barely a loss for Clinton. But the loss of Colorado, the “pivot point” state, is what keeps her from getting over the top in this scenario (as rare as it is, fortunately).

Things get even more far-fetched when you start looking for the likeliest scenario for a 269-269 tie, which would throw the election into the House. You can probably guess what is likeliest to create that scenario, though; Clinton losing New Hampshire even while winning Colorado. (Luckily, New Hampshire has a 95 percent shot at being in Clinton’s column, so that’s a scenario that rarely occurs, even in our hundreds of thousands of simulations.)

Clinton wins Colorado, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Wisconsin; Trump wins Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio (269 EVs; 0.16 percent of all simulations)

If things continue to go from bad to worse for Donald Trump, the first thing you’ll see is Ohio swinging back to gray for Tossup, and probably light blue shortly after that. But keep an eye on Arizona and Georgia (maybe even more so than Iowa, since Arizona and Georgia are much more diverse states and more demographically primed to shift). Beyond that, the list of “reach” states isn’t likely to expand much. States where we’ve occasionally seen tantalizingly close polls (like Alaska, South Carolina, and Texas) are still in the 99 percent range for Trump, because we haven’t seen enough​ close polls there to cancel out the plurality of polls that are less close. That may well change, though, so keep an eye on those states too in coming weeks.

Finally, let’s turn to the Senate. The Democrats’ odds of a majority in the upper chamber are actually down a tick from where they were late last week, at 56 percent. That may change in the coming weeks, hopefully, as the disarray at the top of the ticket trickles down … we haven’t seen it yet, though obviously polls haven’t had time to start picking up on what, if any, effect this weekend’s stampede for the exits by congressional Republicans had.

Part of the problem here is with the Indiana Senate race, which has always been a slam-dunk as far as our model is concerned. However, a poll late last week had only a 1-point lead for Democratic candidate Evan Bayh, at 42-41. This still works out to a 4-point lead after re-weighting it for the fact that it’s a poll from Public Opinion Strategies, a Republican pollster (polls by partisan pollsters get this treatment, which is the only special sauce we apply to polls in the model). Even with that correction, though, that’s enough to bring Bayh’s odds down to 91 percent, since there aren’t a lot of other recent polls here that disagree with that. (Indiana is one of only a few states that bans robo-calls, so a lot fewer pollsters are willing to operate here because of the expense.) For the first time, that brings his chances lower than those of Tammy Duckworth in Illinois (now up to 95 percent) and Russ Feingold in Wisconsin (up to 98 percent).

The weird case in Indiana illustrates why Daily Kos Elections continues to offer​ qualitative race ratings in addition to our model. Indiana is one of the few races … maybe the only race … where there’s such a clear divergence between the model’s odds (which were 99 percent until now), and our qualitative ratings, where we’ve kept the race at a Tossup. In this case, it’s because what’s happening is exactly what we already expected would happen, but had no way of quantitatively accounting for it in a model: Bayh started out with a strong name recognition advantage from his previous terms as a senator, which gave him a big boost when he first entered the race, but that by itself isn’t enough to win.

This was a race where the Republicans were always intending to spend big to boost Rep. Todd Young’s profile and/or take Bayh down a few pegs, and that’s exactly what they did. Helping them along, Bayh hasn’t been exactly nimble in his defense of his six years that he spent after leaving the Senate in 2010, as a lobbyist. On top of that, Bayh’s running in a red state, in a more polarized environment than the last time he ran for office (in 2004). The model may still view his odds favorably (and, indeed, he may still win, especially if Trump’s collapse starts to put Indiana in play at the presidential level), but you never want to see a Democrat running in a red state polling at only 42 percent.

Instead, what probably had a bigger effect on the odds was a lousy poll of the New Hampshire Senate race from Suffolk. While their poll showed Clinton in the lead (albeit by a smaller-than-usual amount), it showed Republican incumbent Kelly Ayotte leading her challenger Maggie Hassan by a 47-41 margin. And that poll had field dates mostly after​ the notorious debate flub where Ayotte said that Trump was a good “role model” for kids. That poll was enough to push Hassan’s odds in the New Hampshire down to 36 percent, which has a disproportionate impact on the overall chances since it’s one of the possible “pivot point” states for Senate control (along with Nevada and North Carolina).

All three of those Senate races, though (Nevada, New Hampshire, and North Carolina), are the ones where there are competing questions: how far Trump will collapse in future weeks of polling, vs. how well the Republican candidate in each race does at separating their identity from Trump. Like I said earlier, it may take several weeks for the effect from the most current events (the leaked video of Trump, and the second debate) to work its way down into the Senate races, and then for enough polls to accurately measure that, so unfortunately we’re going to have to just sit tight and wait longer to see whether the Senate really starts breaking toward the Democrats too.