2016 Election Nowcast | FiveThirtyEight

2016 Election Nowcast | FiveThirtyEight

The statistics geeks now calculate that Trump would have only a 3.6% chance of winning if the election were today.

If the election had been held July 26th, he would have had a 55% chance of winning. The dramatic change illustrates how fast an election can turn, and therefore indicates that it could turn rapidly again (pending various developments, of course).

Trump is now losing in all the key battleground states, and even in a few he was expected to take comfortably, like Georgia (where he has fallen from an 86% chance of winning all the way down to 24), South Carolina (where he has fallen from a 90% chance of winning to 48) and Arizona (where he has fallen from an 86% chance of winning to a 41). Note again that those percentages represent the expectation if the election were today. He is still expected to win those three states in November.

The new Monmouth Poll, released today, shows Hillary ahead by 13 points in a 4-way race. Key facts comparing Trump to Romney in 2012 show a counter-intuitive conclusion: it's white voters that are killing Trump. (Specifically the ones with college educations.)

• Trump is losing non-whites by 59. No surprise there. Romney lost by 63.
• Trump is winning non-college whites by 25. Again no surprise. Romney won by 26.
• Romney beat Obama by 14 points among college-educated whites, while Trump is currently losing that group by somewhere between six and eleven points.

That 20-25 point shift among college-educated whites represents a major loss for the GOP, because that group represents at least a quarter of the electorate.

The other major shift is among women. Romney lost the female vote by 11 points, but Trump is currently losing it by 23-28. Assuming the mid-point in that range, that's a shift of some 15 points within a group that constitutes more than half of the electorate. That fact alone leaves Trump eight points behind Romney coming out of the starting gate, and Romney himself lost by four. That's a lot of ground to make up among males alone, particularly when you've already lost almost all of the non-white ones.