Trump Is Just One Swing State Away From Becoming The Next POTUS

All the Americans who said they would leave the country if Donald Trump is elected President should seriously start making their plans, pack their bags and have their visas ready. Because a Trump presidency is no longer an improbable scenario.

This is how the electoral map in 2012 election looked like:

A candidate needs 270 electoral votes to win. Barack Obama clinched the election by taking 332. Romney got 206.

Now, let’s come to the current presidential cycle. According to RealClearPolitics, a website that keeps track of all opinion polls, Donald Trump is ahead of his rival Hillary Clinton in many of the ‘swing states’ that Romney lost to Obama in 2012.

In electoral lingo in America, swing states refer to the most important states at stake in an election which vote based on the candidate’s profile rather than just on ideological or party lines. The rest of them almost always vote for Republicans or Democrats. In simple terms, they haven’t changed their voting pattern for decades, while the battleground states can swing either way.

There are 10 such battleground states: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Ohio, Iowa, Virginia, Florida, Michigan, Nevada, Colorado, and North Carolina.

RealClearPolitics updates its ‘average of polls’ regularly. As of today (23 September), Trump looks in a very good position to become the next President of the United States.

Out of 10, he is leading Clinton in Florida, Ohio, Nevada, North Carolina and Iowa. Clinton is ahead in the rest. If we plot the electoral map, this is how it looks right now.

From here, Trump just needs one blue state to turn red. Among the swing states, that one state can either be New Hamshire or Colorado where he is behind Clinton by five and 2.5 points respectively. In the rest, Clinton is far ahead of Trump.

If he wins New Hampshire, it will be a tie. Then the US House Of Representatives will decide who becomes President. (Each state gets one vote) Given that the Republicans are in majority right now, which they are likely to retain in November, Trump will become President.

Colorado also puts Trump over the top and directly into the White House by enabling him to cross 270. In fact, Colorado has been a solid Republican state but voted for Obama both in 2008 and 2012. So, Trump’s chances of winning it are higher.

Either way, he becomes President. But there could be many a slip between the cup and the lip. He needs to keep the momentum going and defeat Hillary Clinton at least in two of the three scheduled debates. No one can rule that out.