And, lo, a new Monmouth University poll in that state: Trump trails Hillary Clinton by only four points. In 2012, Barack Obama won the state by 18 points. In 2008, he won by 15 ½. In 2004, John Kerry won by about seven. The last time that a Republican won the state? 1988.

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So is this a sign that Trump's prognostications will come true? That stalwart blue states will change their hue to red thanks to Trump's candidacy?

Probably not.

Patrick Murray, the director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, offers an important caveat in his news release on the new findings. "Blue Jersey doesn’t appear quite so blue at this stage of the campaign," he writes, "but we should keep in mind that neither major party candidate has fully locked in the support of their partisan bases. When and if that happens, the benefit should accrue more to Clinton than to Trump simply because Democrats outnumber Republicans in the state."

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In other words, a big reason that Trump is as close as he is in the state is that Democrats haven't united around Clinton just yet. (Or, for that matter, fully around Trump, but Murray's point is that there are a lot more Democrats in the state.)

As it stands, less than three-quarters of members of each party in the state are prepared to back their party's nominee.

(If Trump picks Gov. Chris Christie as his running mate, by the way, 42 percent of the state's voters say they'd be less likely to back Trump's candidacy. Christie is not popular in his home state.)

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Other demographic splits are about what we'd expect: White voters prefer Trump, non-white voters don't. Younger voters prefer Clinton, older ones don't. Men do. Women don't. The question, then, is that "when and if" — when will partisans circle the wagons, if they do.

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Over the weekend, NBC News released a new analysis of a recent poll it conducted with the Wall Street Journal. In an effort to figure out the extent to which the still-contested Democratic race was a drag on Clinton, NBC recalculated its overall head-to-head match-up by looking at a population of voters that's been talked about a lot in recent weeks: People who would back Bernie Sanders over Trump but won't back Clinton over him.

At least, not right now. In the most recent poll The Washington Post conducted with ABC News, 20 percent of Sanders supporters would back Trump over Clinton — a higher percentage at this point than that of Clinton supporters in 2008 who planned to back John McCain over Barack Obama. NBC took that universe of people who would pick Sanders but not Clinton and assumed that 70 percent of them would eventually come around to Clinton.

In that scenario, the results go from Clinton up three points to Clinton up by eight.

That "70 percent" assumption is grabbed out of thin air, mind you; whether or not those Sanders supporters will line up so solidly behind Clinton remains to be seen. That's the if. His base of support is very independent-minded, and they may be less likely to do so. But in the past, support for primary opponents has consolidated strongly behind the nominee.

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Speaking of grabbing things out of thin air: Trump's argument about which states he will win is based less in numbers than it is in his desire to make a breezy pronouncement about his support. At first glance, this new poll seems to bolster his argument to that end. But it's still too early to assume that a poll — where Trump is losing, mind you — accurately reflects what the race will look like in October.