2016 Election Night

Betting markets have shifted — quickly — in Trump’s favor. His chances of winning have risen to about 25 percent, according to Betfair.

The Upshot’s calculator has Clinton projected to eventually win the popular vote by 3 to 4 percentage points — right in line with where national polls had the race. And yet, they show her winning only 290 or so electoral votes, which obviously means that Trump has a decent shot to win the Electoral College. That potentially seems to validate our finding that Clinton was in a worse position in the Electoral College than the popular vote, since her coalition is not concentrated in swing states.

Election watchers right now are feeling a sense of déjà vu — in the 2014 Virginia Senate race and again right now, Virginia was expected to go easily Democratic, but the early returns are instead suggesting a tight race. In fact, Trump leads the state by just over 3 percentage points. From our look at the data, Clinton is running even with Obama except in the rural, southwestern part of the state, where Trump is outperforming Romney. Still, while 69 percent of precincts are in, just 54 percent of the 2012 major-party vote is in. We suspect that Clinton has a lot of outstanding votes in Virginia Beach and the Norther Virginia suburbs, but it isn’t crazy to think that Virginia could be the crack in the Clinton firewall.