Election Predictions Show Trump Is Majorly Behind

It's safe to say that Donald Trump supporters probably aren't enjoying looking at the polls these days. With the occasional exception, election predictions for Trump are not looking great, no matter how much the GOP nominee and his surrogates like to claim otherwise. This doesn't mean that Hillary Clinton supporters should become complacent, but the election forecasts and polls are generally suggesting that Trump's chances of winning are under 20 percent — or, according to the Huffington Post, only a meager 2.2 percent.

A Trump supporter looking at the most recent round of polls released on Oct. 27 would need to do some serious cherry-picking in order to come away thinking optimistically. While some of the results predicting a Clinton victory fall within the polls' margins of error, of the 13 general election national polls released on Oct. 27, 12 predict a Clinton victory, and one predicts a tie. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times/USC Tracking poll released on Oct. 25, the most recent national poll that turned out well for the Republican nominee, predicted a Trump victory by a margin of 1 percent, which is well within the margin of error.

The poll aggregates have been even more decisive in predicting a Clinton victory. FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver, the "wizard" whose statistical formulas correctly predicted every state plus the District of Columbia in 2012, suggests that Clinton has an 82.2 percent chance of winning the election. This one is actually on the conservative side, compared with the aforementioned Huffington Post aggregator and the New York Times' the Upshot. The Upshot's prediction, which is generated using a model that takes both state and national polling trends into account, has been hovering between a 92 and a 93 percent chance of Clinton winning the presidency.

Putting together a simple average of all the polls is also a decent way of making predictions, and the average right now is right at six points up for Clinton. Another thing that's important to remember is that what the result really comes down to is electoral vote totals. According to state-by-state polls, Clinton would already be at 249 electoral votes (out of 270 necessary for victory) if only the "safe" and "leaning" Democratic states went blue. This isn't even taking into account big battleground states like North Carolina and Florida, where Clinton has a 65.4 percent and 65.3 percent of winning, respectively.

Most of these polls gather their information from likely voters, though, so the Clinton camp shouldn't grow too comfortable just yet. The more Clinton supporters decide that the polls look overwhelmingly good for their candidate and don't go to vote because of that, the higher a chance Trump has of winning. Even while looking at the most trustworthy of polls, it's necessary to remember that they are fallible, and that huge electoral surprises have happened in the past. All in all, the best thing any one person can do to help his or her candidate win is to go turn a poll response into an actual vote cast on or before Nov. 8.