But now things are looking very different. According to a round of polls taken after the conventions ended, it’s Democratic voters who are more united around their candidate.

If you’ll bear with me, I’d like to quickly go through some numbers and try to determine what they portend (HuffPost/Pollster helpfully gathers the polls here if you want to check them out for yourself).

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What I’m interested in at the moment is the simple question of how many Democrats say they’re behind Hillary Clinton and how many Republicans say they’re behind Donald Trump. So here’s the rundown. All of these national polls were released this week, and the surveys were conducted after the end of the Democratic convention:

— In Fox’s poll, Clinton leads Trump among Democrats by 87-5, while Trump leads Clinton among Republicans by only 78-12.

— In CNN’s poll, Clinton leads among Democrats by 96-3 while Trump leads among Republicans by 84-8.

— In CBS’s poll, Clinton leads Trump among Democrats by 86-10, while Trump leads among Republicans by 81-13.

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— Public Policy Polling shows Clinton winning Democrats by 83-9 and Trump winning Republicans by 79-8.

— Morning Consult shows Clinton winning Democrats by 82-11 and Trump winning Republicans by 78-9.

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— Ipsos/Reuters shows Clinton winning Democrats by 79-9 and Trump winning Republicans by 71-6.

There’s some variation there, as you’d expect. So let’s take the average: Clinton’s getting 85.5 percent of Democratic votes and Trump is getting 79.3 percent of Republican votes. Keep in mind that both of these numbers will rise by election day, as the undecideds finally make up their minds. But that six-point advantage is even bigger than it appears, and I’ll explain why in a moment.

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For some historical context, in 2012 Barack Obama won 92 percent of Democrats according to exit polls, while Mitt Romney won 93 percent of Republicans. Four years earlier, Obama won 89 percent of Democrats while John McCain won 90 percent of Republicans. Four years before that, John Kerry won 89 percent of Democrats and George Bush got 93 percent of Republicans.

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While we don’t know for sure what the voting electorate is going to look like this year, those numbers tell you that for a Republican to win, he needs to not just match the Democrat in party loyalty, but exceed her by a significant margin. That’s because there are more Democrats than Republicans. In most surveys at the moment, the number of people calling themselves Democrats exceeds the number calling themselves Republicans by around five points, whether you include “leaners” (those who say they’re independent but lean to one party or the other) or not. That isn’t a huge gap, but it’s an important one, because it means that Trump needs not just to do as well as Clinton among his own partisans, he needs to do better than her. And right now he’s doing worse.

One of the things these results tell us is that Bernie Sanders’ voters are coming home to Clinton. During the convention I argued that the Sanders supporters protesting Clinton in the streets (and many of those inside the hall) were mostly not Democrats at all, but leftists who had voted for third-party candidates before and would again — and will in the end likely have a negligible effect on the outcome of the race. If you offer them a four-way choice instead of a two-way choice, some are pulled away from Clinton. For instance, in CNN’s poll, when Sanders voters were presented with a choice between Clinton and Trump, they chose Clinton by 91-6. When they got four options, including Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, 69 percent stuck with Clinton, 10 percent went to Johnson, and 13 percent went to Stein. That’s a significant difference, but it’s already smaller than it was a short time ago, when some polls showed nearly half of Sanders supporters saying they’d support someone other than Clinton.

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And as the campaign goes on and Trump’s awfulness becomes more vivid with each passing week, the election will seem more and more like a two-way choice and not a four-way choice.

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Of course, there are no guarantees in any of this. Clinton could do things that anger liberal Democrats, pushing them away. Gary Johnson could explode like a libertarian supernova, get admitted into the debates, and begin to seem like a viable option (though if he does, he’s as likely to pull voters from Trump as from Clinton, if not more so). Clinton’s efforts to convince Republican voters to reject Trump could fail.

