There are 15 critical states. If you follow these you will know who the next President of the United States will be. These critical states:
Neither candidate will win all. Hillary Clinton should win the election and up to the FBI revisiting the email controversy (and then closing it again with no charges on the Sunday before the vote). Clinton should have won big with significant gains in the Congress. This would have been good news in terms of efforts to institute effective governing. The FBI controversy hurt her campaign. It has led to a more limited, less ambitious strategy in terms of the final days of campaigning. It helped Trump significantly and for that matter, Republicans at all levels. It has introduced more uncertainty than justified into the presidential race. Still, Clinton should win; she has the ground organization to turn out the vote, media support, all the funding she needs, and celebrity surrogates all in her favor. Trump has none of these. A Clinton victory is already being celebrated by the stock market. If Trump should win, it would be an extraordinary upset, among the greatest in American history.
It has been a wild and dispiriting campaign. Whoever wins is likely to have their legitimacy questioned and to be the target of controversy, justified or not, into the foreseeable future.
William J Crotty is the Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr. Chair in Public Life and Emeritus Professor of Political Science at Northeastern University, Boston. He is the author of Winning the Presidency 2016 (Routledge, forthcoming in 2017).
