NYT/Siena Polls of 6 Battleground States

[MT Treasurer]

My takeaways (keeping in mind that this is just one poll):

- Is there really a good reason to believe that NC is more likely to flip than GA? I could see it voting 1% to the left of GA, but not more than that. It doesn’t make much sense to rate NC a Tossup and GA Lean R, if you ask me.
- MI can’t be taken granted by Democrats and is not Lean/Likely D in a close race (although I don’t buy the Trump +6 result vs. Warren in particular--their MI numbers might be too R-friendly).
- WI can’t be taken for granted by Republicans and is not Lean R in a close race, especially if there’s a collapse in R support in WOW (in line with the suburban trends we’ve seen across the country) and urban WI (especially Milwaukee) looks more like 2018 than 2016. That said, I still think it’ll be more Republican than PA at least.
- Democrats would be colossally stupid if they didn’t go all in on Florida. Conceding 29 electoral votes when their path to 270 is already fairly narrow and other swing states might be trending away from them would be beyond dumb. It will definitely require some effort, but it’s not unwinnable even in a close race.
- IA isn’t a swing state and certainly not as "elastic" as people are making it out to be, but I’m not going to dwell on that. We could see a regression to the mean here (similar to NV 2012), but if IA is even close, Democrats already have the Senate + presidency.
- I’ve said repeatedly that AZ is one of the (if not the) shakiest states for Trump, and I don’t see it voting Republican if he’s losing other swing states like WI or FL. I’d argue that this one is actually a must-win for Democrats.
- Overall pretty bad numbers for Democrats considering that Trump seems to be trailing nationally by 5-8%. They’re probably slightly favored, but the PV/EC split will probably be even more dramatic this time if they can’t win the PV by 3.5-4%.

[MT Treasurer]

Yeah, Democrats should not count on FL

Democrats aren’t the ones making overconfident predictions about FL this time.