Press.
voanews.com
It is nearly
three months before the U.S. presidential election, but numerous analysts are
now saying there is more than an 80 percent likelihood that Democrat Hillary
Clinton, a former U.S. Secretary of State, will defeat Republican Donald Trump,
the brash real estate tycoon running for his first elected office.
There are 12
weeks of campaigning remaining before the November 8 election to replace
President Barack Obama when he leaves office next January, along with three scheduled
debates between Clinton and Trump in September and October that could change
the fortunes for either candidate.
But at the
moment, the analysts see the race tipping heavily in Clinton's favor, with her
lead holding at a steady seven-percentage point advantage in national polling
and growing margins in key state election battlegrounds where U.S. presidential
elections are decided. The quadrennial U.S. presidential contests are not
determined by the national popular vote, but rather on the outcome of the
voting in the 50 states, with each state's importance in the electoral college
determined by its population and the number of senators and representatives it
has in Congress.
In as many as 40
of the states, voters in election after election have sided with Democrats or
Republicans, while the outcome in the other 10, where political allegiances are
not as ingrained, has often switched from one party to the other depending who
the candidates are or the political issues of the moment.
It is in these
election battleground states where some of the analysts say that Clinton is
already amassing a majority of 270 or more of the 538 electoral college votes
needed to make her the country's 45th president and its first female commander
in chief.
The New York Times,
the "538" election prediction web site, the Princeton Election
Consortium and PredictWise all say that Clinton has an 80 percent or more
chance of winning, with political analysts Charlie Cook, Larry Sabato and the
team of Stuart Rothenberg and Nathan Gonzales all saying the election is
tipping toward her.
Post convention
boost
Both Trump, who
surged past more seasoned Republican officials to claim the party's
presidential nomination, and Clinton, the wife of former President Bill
Clinton, enjoyed new support in political surveys in the aftermath of the
Republican and Democratic national conventions last month. After the Republican
convention, Trump pulled into a virtual tie in national surveys with Clinton,
but she quickly regained the edge after the Democratic convention and polls
uniformly show her ahead at the moment.
Long-time
political guru Cook said with the two political conventions ended, the national
race is not over, but is "one that is fully developed." He added,
"Many observers have noted that in the last six decades of modern
presidential polling, the candidate with the lead in the polls two weeks after
the final convention has always won. We see this race settling into a very high
probability that Hillary Clinton prevails over Donald Trump, though the size of
the margin is still up in the air."
Polls show that
Americans hold negative views about both candidates, but more against him than
her. Surveys show that has left some voters to make their choice more on who
they dislike more rather than voting for either Clinton or Trump.
But Trump's
fortunes have fallen quickly in the last two weeks with his controversial
comments about the Muslim-American parents of a U.S. soldier killed in Iraq in
2004 after they voiced their support for Clinton.
Trump also
suggested that Russia hack into Clinton's computer to find thousands of her
discarded emails and falsely claimed that Obama and she were the founders of
the Islamic State militant group. He later said both comments were meant as
sarcasm.
The "538"
site that has had a very accurate election prediction model in past
presidential contests says there is more than a 90 percent chance that Clinton
wins the national popular vote and a more than 88 percent chance she wins the
electoral college and the presidency.
The New York
Times rates her chances at 87 percent, saying that its computer analysis of
state-by-state contests currently show that Clinton has 1,011 ways to amass the
majority 270 electoral college votes, while Trump has but 10.
Trump has hardly
conceded, however, unveiling a plan Monday to combat Islamic terrorism and
claiming that Clinton "lacks the mental and physical stamina" needed
to fight the jihadists.
She in turn said
that Trump is "temperamentally unfit to be president of the United States
and totally unqualified."
But Trump last
week offered a fatalistic assessment of the state of his campaign against
Clinton, saying that if he loses, "I'm going to have a very, very nice
long vacation."
At a voter
registration event Tuesday in the eastern city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
Clinton acknowledged that her campaign is "doing fine right now," but
warned against being over-confident in the eventual outcome.
Clinton said she
is "not taking anybody, anywhere for granted" in the election.
"We're going to work hard the next 85 days," she said.
Trump is in
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the Midwestern city where there are continuing protests
over the fatal shooting of an armed black man by a black police officer last
weekend. Trump is meeting with law enforcement officers, holding a town hall
gathering with voters and speaking at a political rally.
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