There is a lot of media drooling over polls showing Donald Trump cratering in state after state. I find this gloating to be unseemly. Here at PEC, you can do all your gloating in one go, saving time for other reactions, like schadenfreude.

Plotted below are median Clinton-minus-Trump margins in all states for which August polling is available, plotted against Obama-over-Romney margins at the same point in the 2012 campaign. This horizontal axis quantity is better to plot than the final Obama-Romney election margins, which include undecided voters’ final commitments – not a fair comparison.

The data come from RealClearPolitics.

Clinton is overperforming Obama in 15 out of 17 states, the significant exceptions being deeply Democratic Maine and New York. Overall, the difference is a median of 5.8 +/- 1.4% (estimated one-sigma SEM).

This is very similar to the picture in July, before the conventions. I wrote then that Trump needed to recover disaffected Republican voters in red states. At that time, his red-state leads were smaller than Romney’s 2012 win margins by a median of 9.3%. Hillary Clinton’s blue-state leads were smaller than Obama’s wins by 1.9%. The difference was about 7%, comparable to the value of 5.8% given above.

Recall that the popular vote margin in 2012 was Obama 51.1%, Romney 47.2%. If Clinton’s strong performance were to persist until the election, 12 weeks from now, the popular margin would end up at approximately Clinton 54%, Trump 44%. If we assume a disaffected 6% go to other candidates, that leaves Clinton 51%, Trump 41%, 8% Johnson/Stein/McMullin.

I find this quite amazing. After attacking Gold Star parents, advocating Second Amendment remedies, and other stuff too tedious to recount, Donald Trump will probably still end up with at least 40% of the popular vote. That is an impressive testament to the partisan polarization that has developed since 1992.

The other feature of the graph above is its correlation coefficient, +0.87. Voters are entrenched in the same positions as 2012 – and earlier, for as long as we’ve had the now-familiar red-state/blue-state arrangement. To most Republican voters, any candidate they field – whether it be Mitt Romney or Donald Trump – is preferrable to a Democrat.