Hilary Clinton Leading!

First things first: Hillary Clinton has a 70 percent chance of winning the election, according to both the FiveThirtyEight polls-only and polls-plus models. That’s up from a 65 percent chance on Sunday night, so Clinton has had a good run in the polls in the final days of the campaign. Clinton’s projected margin of victory in the popular vote has increased to 3.5 percent from 2.9 percent.
We’ll continue to collect polls through early Tuesday morning, at which point we’ll update the model for the last time and publish a more philosophical overview on the race. But I’m not sure how much more data we’re really expecting — most of it will probably just be state and national tracking polls that run one last update.

As a lot of you noticed, Nevada, North Carolina and Florida flipped from red to blue over the course of Monday. We don’t think that’s a particularly meaningful metric, because the forecasts are probabilistic — Clinton’s chances of winning Florida increased to 54 percent from 48 percent, for instance, which is nontrivial but not an especially large change. Still, we know it’s something a lot of readers follow. It’s unlikely that any further states will flip to Clinton in our final forecast, as she’s too far behind in Ohio, the next-closest state.¹ It’s possible that Florida and North Carolina could flip back to Trump by tomorrow morning, though probably not Nevada, where Clinton’s lead is a bit larger.
Mostly, though, the number I have on my mind today is “4.” That’s because it kept coming up over and over as national polls were released today: It seemed like every pollster had Clinton leading by 4 percentage points.