The states that are more likely to flip are the ones we call "swing states," though we often disagree on which states count. There are nine states that have only voted the same way since 2008 or which flipped between 2008 and 2012: Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia. If we knew who would win those states — or, really, just who would win a few of the bigger ones — we'd know who will win in November.

We don't know that, of course, which is part of the reason that campaigns are fun. All we can do is look at the polling and try to figure out where we're headed. (Are there more important pursuits? There are. There are hungry children to feed, lonely pets to adopt, diseases to cure, people to house, wars to end; for voters there are policy positions to parse, candidate biographies to learn and speeches to read. But for those of us so thoroughly immersed in 2016 that we see "Donald Trump says, 'China'" and immediately think "CHYna" in our heads, a bit of speculation about the horse race is all we've got.)

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So let's walk through a number of states that are on that list — and a few that aren't — to see how 2016 and past elections might differ.

In Pennsylvania, for example, Hillary Clinton is leading Trump according to the RealClearPolitics average of recent polls in the state. But she's not doing as well in Pennsylvania as Barack Obama was doing at this point in 2008 or 2012.

In Arizona, on the other hand, Clinton is doing much better than Obama was four years ago. (RealClearPolitics doesn't have an average for Arizona in 2008 because it was Republican nominee John McCain's home state.)

In the states listed above for which there are enough polls at this point for RealClearPolitics to average, Clinton's generally doing fairly well. In Florida, North Carolina and Virginia, she's doing better than Obama did in his two races.

In Ohio and New Hampshire, she leads but isn't doing as well as Obama did.

Trump insists that he will do well in Rust Belt states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. We've seen that he's doing as well as Mitt Romney was in Ohio and better in Pennsylvania. In Wisconsin, though, he's still well behind.

Meanwhile, Georgia is sometimes described as a state that might flip for the Democrats this year, the first time it would have done so since 1992. Clinton's doing much better now than Obama was four and eight years ago, but she still trails.

On the whole, though, Clinton is doing better against Trump than Obama was against Romney in six of the nine states we looked at. In the other three, she still holds a lead — just not as big as the one Obama enjoyed.

If these are our tea leaves, what future do we foresee? One in which the lines on the graphs above will continue to move, often in unpredictable ways. This is what's known in the vernacular as a cop-out, but we encourage you, humble reader, to make predictions of your own about how that graph of the streaks in each state will look by Thanksgiving this year.

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