Hillary Clinton’s lead over Donald Trump in recent national polls has been shrinking, with key swing states like Florida and North Carolina looking increasingly competitive and Ohio and Iowa appearing to have fallen beyond her reach.
But to win an Electoral College majority of at least 270 votes, Clinton doesn’t need to win any of those states. She just needs to hold six swing states where public polling has generally shown her doing very well: Michigan, Wisconsin, Virginia, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire.
This group of states has been dubbed Clinton’s “firewall,” and she’s led the vast, vast majority of polls of them this year. Indeed, her campaign cut off its ad spending in Virginia and Colorado back in August, signaling that they were in the bag, and never even bothered to run ads in Wisconsin and Michigan.
But this week, a series of new public polls have suggested the Clinton campaign may have gotten overconfident. Three polls released Thursday in New Hampshire showed either a tied race or Trump taking the lead. And recent polls in Colorado, Virginia, and Michigan haven’t offered the campaign all that much comfort either.
This is hugely important because if Trump breaches Clinton’s firewall, he’ll have a real shot at winning the presidency, unless Clinton can make up her losses with gains elsewhere.
So after several months of essentially ignoring several of these states, at least as far as ad spending is concerned, the Clinton campaign has started running ads in all six of them — which could be either simple prudent good sense or a sign of deeper concern about the way the race has moved.
1) What is Hillary Clinton’s swing state firewall?
It’s the six swing states where Clinton has long had the biggest leads in polls, and the ones that would be sufficient, when combined with the solidly Democratic states, to get her to an Electoral College majority. They are:
- Michigan (16 electoral votes)
- Wisconsin (10 electoral votes)
- Virginia (13 electoral votes)
- Colorado (9 electoral votes)
- Pennsylvania (20 electoral votes)
- New Hampshire (4 electoral votes)
The firewall states and the solidly Democratic states, together, would be enough to put Clinton over 270 electoral votes. So she’d win the presidency even if she loses every other contest that’s believed to be competitive — Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Nevada, Arizona, Iowa, and Maine’s second congressional district.
Clinton still appears to be competitive in many of those other swing states, like Florida, North Carolina, and Nevada, but polls of those states have generally been closer than polls of the firewall states (where she’s usually tended to lead by 5 or more points, though there’s been some tightening recently).
So Clinton’s supporters have long felt comforted that even if the race tightened by a couple of points nationwide and states like Florida and North Carolina slipped away from her, the firewall seemed likely to remain intact and protect her victory.
2) Back up — what is a firewall?
The term “firewall” might call to mind a blazing tower of flames, but unfortunately the real thing is much less cool — it’s a regular wall or structure of some kind meant to prevent the spread of fire. Often it’s thicker than a normal wall and made out of a fire-resistant material such as concrete. The term is often used in the context of computer networks, when it refers to a security system used to block attacks by hackers.
So in the context of the election, a late surge in Donald Trump support would be the spreading fire, and those six states would be the firewall that protects Clinton’s Electoral College majority.
3) Do the six firewall states have anything in common?
They’re a bit of a mixed bag. Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania have all voted Democratic in every presidential election since the 1990s. But they seem to have gotten a bit less blue in recent years. While President Obama won all three states twice, his margin of victory dropped by 5 to 7 points between 2008 and 2012 — more than his decline in the national popular vote. This is apparently due to non-college-educated white voters trending away from the Democratic Party, since all these states are somewhere around 80 percent white.
Virginia and Colorado, on the other hand, had both been consistent Republican states until President Obama won them in 2008 and again in 2012. In both years, they were two of the most competitive states in the nation. But this time around, they’ve been firmly in the “lean Democrat” column. That’s because these economically vibrant states have changed demographically — each has seen a growing nonwhite population share coupled with in-migration of whites born elsewhere. Both groups tend to lean Democratic more than each state’s native-born whites, and college-educated white voters and nonwhite voters of all stripes have particularly tended to spurn Trump.
Finally, there is ornery old New Hampshire, the tiny, overwhelmingly white (92 percent) state that has long been more moderate than the rest of New England. New Hampshire has gone Democratic in five of the past six presidential elections. The one exception: George W. Bush narrowly won the state in 2000.
4) How did these six states become known as the firewall?
One of the most telling indications of whether a campaign believes a state is competitive is in how it spends its ad dollars, a decision that is traditionally informed by copious internal data. If you spend a lot of money buying ads in a state, you probably believe it’s competitive. If you think you’ve got it locked up or you believe it’s out of reach, your dollars are best spent elsewhere.
So back when the Clinton campaign started buying general election ads, it actually didn’t buy any in Michigan or Wisconsin, which signaled that it thought those two states were firmly in Clinton’s column already.
Then around midsummer, Clinton canceled ads in two states where she had been previously been on the airwaves — Colorado and Virginia.
By early August, after the Democratic convention, polling began to indicate that Clinton was breaking away in those four states, along with Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. She remained on the airwaves in the latter two states, but that’s when talk of this six-state firewall to get her over 270 electoral votes began to emerge, based on the public polling information as well as her ad spending and travel decisions.
5) Is the firewall still holding?
Just a few days ago, Clinton’s firewall still looked very solid indeed. Until this week, Trump hadn’t led in even a single poll of Virginia, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, or Michigan all year. He hadn’t led in a poll of Pennsylvania since July, and he hadn’t led any in Colorado since September.
So the Clinton campaign appeared to be sitting pretty, despite a tightening race nationally and the FBI letter on her emails released last Friday.
Since then, though, some new polls have come out that have complicated this picture.
In Wisconsin, things still look good for Clinton. The final installment of the highly respected Marquette Law poll, released Wednesday, showed her leading Trump by 6, and every other recent poll put her up by a similar margin.
Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania — the biggest firewall state — four recent polls have all shown Clinton still ahead by between 2 and 5 points. Her margin has gotten smaller and she can’t take the state for granted, but she still looks in good shape.
In some other states, though, polling has been sparse and low-quality — with many polls coming from Emerson College, which controversially doesn’t poll cellphone users, and Remington Research, a Republican firm with polling that’s tended to favor Republicans relative to the averages. So it’s difficult to tell what’s going on.
- In Colorado, a University of Denver poll showed Clinton and Trump shockingly tied, but another from the GOP-aligned firm Magellan Strategies showed her up 6.
- In Virginia, a Washington Post poll showed Clinton up 6, but a shocking Hampton University poll showed her down by 3 in a two-way matchup against Trump — but then a new Roanoke College poll showed Clinton up 7.
- In Michigan — a state where primary polling was famously wrong — we haven’t gotten much at all in the past week, except for a Fox 2/Mitchell poll showing Clinton’s lead shrinking to just 3 points. There have also been rumblings that Democrats are concerned about black voter turnout in the state, which could explain why Clinton is traveling to Detroit on Friday.
But the most vulnerable firewall state of all appears to be New Hampshire. Four polls released Thursday showed, respectively, Trump winning the state by 1, Trump winning by 5, and (twice) a tied race. This was a stunning set of results in a state where Trump hadn’t led a general election poll all year. (And interestingly, Trump appears to be benefiting somewhat from a decline in support for Gary Johnson in the state.)
The one silver lining for Clinton there is that New Hampshire is the smallest and therefore least important state in the firewall. If things should go ill for her there, she could fill the gap by winning Nevada instead — a state where early voting appears to look very good for Democrats, boding a better result than the public polling suggests.
6) Did the Clinton campaign mistakenly take some of these states for granted?
Since the race has tightened, there’s been a bit of controversy over whether the Clinton campaign adequately protected her firewall, as Ron Brownstein writes.
Essentially, Clinton has tried to go on offense with her ad spending rather than on defense — for months, she’s been directing the vast bulk of her ad money (and her personal campaign travel) to states she doesn’t seem to actually “need” to win — states like Florida, North Carolina, Nevada, Ohio, and lately Arizona.
Obviously, an effort to win states she doesn’t truly “need” is a worthwhile endeavor, but given their demographics and the way the public polling has gone, it’s generally assumed that they’re unlikely to be the states that put her over 270 electoral votes. Furthermore, if the race were to tighten nationwide by several points, those states Clinton didn’t need could slide out of reach, and the contest could come down to whether she can protect her firewall.
Yet other than Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, the firewall states have gone undefended by ad spending for months, even though Clinton’s lead in public polling of these states really was not all that big (she’s been up by 7 points or so in Michigan and Virginia, around 6 in Wisconsin, and 5 in Colorado).
Indeed, when Trump started buying ads in those latter three states this fall, the Clinton campaign ignored him for weeks — letting him go up on the airwaves unopposed.
Now that the race appears to have gotten closer, Clinton is running ads in all six firewall states (as of this week), but nervous Democrats are wondering whether she should have invested in them more in the previous months, to better protect her flank from a surprise late surge by Trump.
It is also possible, though, that the Clinton team has seen somewhat more favorable data privately that drove their decision-making in these cases, since we’ve had relatively few high-quality polls in some of these states. For instance, the public polling in Colorado shows a pretty close race. But it’s also been pretty sparse, with few from really respected firms, and Colorado is a tough state to poll even in the best of times. The Clinton campaign’s relative lack of emphasis on the state would make sense if their own polling and data collection were telling them some very different things about where the race is there.
But in the closing days, the Clinton team is taking nothing for granted. On Friday, Hillary Clinton will be in Michigan, Bill Clinton will be in Colorado, and Vice President Joe Biden will be in Wisconsin. On Monday, President Obama will travel to New Hampshire, and Tim Kaine will campaign in his home state of Virginia. And the Obamas and Clintons are both going to Philadelphia on Monday night for the final get-out-the-vote rally before the election. All the top surrogates will do their best to keep that firewall intact.