With just two days to go before the election, many Americans are mesmerised by each and every turn in the polls of what seems to be a tightening race.
Nonetheless, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton is still more likely to win on Tuesday ― especially when considering all the polling available and not just the horserace metrics. Here are some key figures that point to a Clinton victory:
Clinton’s favourable rating is better than Trump’s.
While both candidates are historically unpopular with a majority of Americans, Clinton is marginally more popular than GOP nominee Donald Trump ― a good sign for her with just two days to go.
HuffPost Pollster’s aggregate shows Clinton with a 42 percent favourable rating and a 56 percent unfavourable rating nationally, putting her at a net -14 points. Trump fares worse ― 39 percent favourable to 59 percent unfavourable, putting him at a net -20 points.
Obama’s high ratings spell good news for Clinton.
It bodes well for a presidential candidate to have an incumbent president of the same party with high approval ratings in office while they’re running.
A study from the University of Virginia last year found that if the outgoing president has an approval rating over 50 percent, it is highly likely that the presidential candidate from his party will win the popular vote. While the correlation is not ironclad, historical precedent suggests it can be a predictive factor.
That’s good news for Clinton. President Barack Obama has a 52 percent approval rating, according to HuffPost Pollster, and has seen some of his highest approval ratings since his 2012 re-election in recent weeks. His favorability rating is high, too.
Americans trust Clinton more across key issues.
The latest Pew Research Poll finds that voters have more trust in Clinton’s leadership than Trump’s across nearly all major issue areas.
Registered voters surveyed said they think Clinton will do a better job than Trump in making wise foreign policy decisions, selecting Supreme Court justices and dealing with race relations.
They also have more faith in Clinton when it comes to health care, immigration and managing the federal government.
Trump leads Clinton in voters’ trust in improving economic conditions and reducing special interest influence. The GOP nominee is also considered slightly more trustworthy than Clinton.
A recent analysis by HuffPost’s Samantha Neal found that Trump is the most distrusted Republican candidate in recent history on several key policy issues that GOP candidates have tended poll better on.
Americans think Clinton has the better temperament for the job.
While a large majority of Americans don’t consider the candidates’ personal qualities to be a top concern in determining who they support, most still think Clinton has a better temperament than Trump to serve effectively as president.
Early voting trends favour Clinton.
This year, 30 to 40 percent of votes are expected to come from early voting, and so far, a greater number of Democrats than Republicans have already voted in key battleground states.
Democrats have turned out in unexpectedly large numbers in Nevada, Florida, Colorado, Arizona and other swing states that are likely to decide the election.
Americans overwhelmingly believe Clinton will win.
A majority of voters in recent polls believe Clinton will be the winner of the race. Questions that test voters’ perceptions of who will win are said to be more indicative of the actual winner than horserace polls asking who they will vote for.
The two most recent polls, from ABC News/Washington Post and Fox News, suggest that voters have become less certain that Clinton will be the winner. These polls were conducted after FBI Director James Comey announced the agency was looking into new emails possibly connected to Clinton (and before he eventually cleared her of wrongdoing, again.) Still, even in the wake of the announcement of new emails, most voters think she will win against Trump.
Forecast models all predict a Clinton win.
All of the available forecast models give Clinton a high probability of winning the election, though they vary in the odds they give her. HuffPost Pollster’s forecast model says Clinton has a 98 percent chance of winning. Others, like the New York Times’ Upshot and FiveThirtyEight, indicate a Clinton win with a lesser, but still high, certainty.
While a high probability of a Clinton victory doesn’t mean it will be a blowout, it seems like Clinton is holding strong ― not just in the polls but across several metrics.
Janie Velencia contributed reporting.