NEW YORK (Reuters) – After a brutal week for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, Democrat Hillary Clinton maintained a substantial projected advantage in the race to win the Electoral College and claim the US presidency, according to the latest results from the Reuters/Ipsos States of the Nation project released yesterday.
If the election were held this week, the project estimates that Clinton’s odds of securing the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the presidency at more than 95 per cent, and by a margin of 118 Electoral College votes. It is the second week in a row that the project has estimated her odds so high.
The results mirror other Electoral College projections, some of which estimate Clinton’s chance of winning at around 90 per cent.
For the Trump campaign there are a handful of states the Republican candidate must win if he is to cobble together enough states to win the White House.
Among them is Florida, but numerous recent visits to the Sunshine State by Trump and his vice-presidential running mate Mike Pence did little to dent Clinton’s advantage in the contest for the state’s 29 Electoral College votes. She leads by 6 percentage points, about the same lead she enjoyed last week.
Still, the race tightened in Ohio, another important state for Trump. Both Ohio and Nevada were leaning toward Clinton last week but are now toss-ups.
However, Clinton’s support grew in North Carolina and Colorado, both of which moved from toss-ups to leaning Clinton.
In the last week, the Trump campaign struggled to respond to allegations from several women that Trump had groped them or made unwanted sexual advances over several decades. Trump said the reports were lies and part of a media conspiracy to defeat him.
All of the allegations came after The Washington Post disclosed a video from 2005 of Trump describing how he tried to seduce a married woman and bragged in vulgar terms how his celebrity allowed him to kiss and grope women without permission.
