Hillary Clinton speaks during a rally in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Getty)
Hillary Clinton is beginning to increase her odds of winning Florida in many election forecasts, while other models say that Donald Trump is now likely to capture the state.
On November 6th, FiveThirtyEight was forecasting a Donald Trump victory in Florida, giving him a 52.5 percent chance of winning. The state has flipped from red to blue in the past 24 hours; as of November 7th, the FiveThirtyEight model now gives Donald Trump a 48.5 percent chance of winning Florida, with Hillary Clinton having the better odds of 51.6 percent. On their forecast, we can see a clear dip that occurs in the immediate aftermath of the news that the FBI would be looking into new emails relevant to the Hillary Clinton investigation, but now her lead is beginning to rise again.
FiveThirtyEight is also forecasting that Hillary Clinton will win 48.2 percent of the popular vote in Florida, while Donald Trump will receive 48.0 percent of it.
But in The New York Times’ The Upshot, Florida is actually beginning to move in Donald Trump’s direction. On November 6th, the Times’ model gave Hillary Clinton a 70 percent chance of winning the state, but now, this number has gone down to 66 percent. And two weeks ago, before the FBI news was released, Hillary Clinton had an 80 percent chance of winning Florida on The Upshot. The model currently gives Clinton an 84 percent chance of becoming the next president. Clearly, Clinton does not absolutely need Florida to win, while Donald Trump almost certainly can’t reach 270 Electoral College votes without it.
On PredictWise, Hillary Clinton now has better odds of winning Florida than she did yesterday. On November 6th, Clinton was given a 73 percent chance of winning Florida by PredictWise, but now that has gone up two points to 75 percent. Surprisingly, PredictWise is actually giving Clinton better odds of winning Florida today than she had prior to the FBI announcement on October 28th. Hours before that news dropped, Clinton’s odds of winning Florida were at 72 percent. In the aftermath of that bombshell, her odds fell all the way down to 58 percent, but she has now more than recovered from it. Nationally, PredictWise gives Clinton an 89 percent chance of winning the election, up two points since yesterday.
Meanwhile, a dramatic shift has taken place on The Huffington Post’s forecast. On Sunday, this model gave Clinton a 93 percent chance of winning Florida, and the state was placed in the “probable Clinton” column. Twenty-four hours later, Florida has been moved into the “battleground” column, and her odds of winning the state have dropped down to 89 percent. The Huffington Post has also moved North Carolina from “probable Clinton” into “battleground.” One day ago, Clinton’s projected minimum number of Electoral College votes was 317, but now that has dropped down to 273.
Clinton has seen a very slight bump in DailyKos‘ election forecast, though. On November 6th, they gave her a 74 percent chance of winning Florida, but that has now gone up one point to 75 percent. This bump also came as DailyKos released its final election prediction. They expect Hillary Clinton to win 323 Electoral College votes – including that of North Carolina and Florida – and Donald Trump to win 215 votes.
It’s easy to see why all these shifts have taken place, as several key Florida polls were released on Monday that show the race to be much tighter than it was just one day ago. Yesterday, Hillary Clinton was ahead in Real Clear Politics’ Florida polling average by 0.9 percentage points, but today, Trump leads by 0.3 percent. No polls have yet been released that reflect the FBI’s recent announcement that they would still not be recommending charges against Hillary Clinton after reviewing the new set of e-mails, so it remains to be seen if Clinton will be able to recover even more of her lead in the aftermath of that news.