Trump Has Just a 25-Percent Chance but Could Win: Polling Analyst

The 2016 election shows that paying attention to polls may be more important than ever, according to FiveThirtyEight’s senior political writer and analyst Harry Enten.

Enten said Clinton has about a 75-percent chance of winning the general election, according to FiveThirtyEight’s polls-plus model, which uses national and state polls along with other demographic and economic measures.

But that could change, Enten said on ABC’s Powerhouse Politics podcast.

“There’s a reason why we don’t have Hillary Clinton as a 100-percent chance of winning the election,” Enten said. For example, “if the economy went south,” Enten said, “Donald Trump would have a better chance of winning.”

Reflecting on the 2016 primary process, Enten said to ABC News Deputy Political Director Shushannah Walshe and correspondent Brad Mielke that Americans ought to keep a close eye on opinion polls. He said one takeaway from the primaries is that Americans should “trust the polls more than our intuition, and perhaps more than other fundamentals in the past that have been more reliable indicators.”

“Donald Trump jumped out to a lead in the polls fairly early on,” Enten said. But people were dismissing Trump’s campaign and “we were like ‘oh no, it’s too early, we shouldn’t trust the polls.’”

Despite Clinton’s strong prospects for winning the election, Enten said that Americans should not take a Clinton victory for granted. “We give Donald Trump about a 25-percent chance of winning the election,” Enten said, referring to FiveThirtyEight’s forecasts. But, he said things with a 25-percent chance of occurring "happen all of the time.”

In regard to this week’s news on the Department of Justice closing its investigation into Clinton’s use of private email servers during her tenure as secretary of state, Enten said he does not expect this to change Americans' views of Clinton or Trump.

“Most people already don’t believe Hillary Clinton on any number of issues,” he said, citing her polling numbers for honesty and trustworthiness, and “most people see Donald Trump as a blowhard.”

“These are two historically flawed candidates,” Enten said. “Right now, more Americans are choosing the lesser of two evils in Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump.”

Enten also noted the role that third-party candidates are playing in the election cycle. “We have seen the third-party candidates doing better than we’ve traditionally seen third-party candidates doing,” but because there are “very few true independents” in the electorate, “I don’t think it should be too surprising that at least at this point Gary Johnson and Jill Stein aren’t polling all that well” in polls against Clinton and Trump.

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