Donald Trump
Donald TrumpReuters

What was unthinkable a year ago when real estate mogul and former reality TV star Donald Trump threw his hat into the ring has become undeniably plausible. On January 20th, 2017, Donald J. Trump could very well become the 45th President of the United States, making him the first president since Eisenhower to win the White House without having ever held public office, and the first president ever with no past experience in either the government or military.

Even after Trump effectively clinched the nomination on May 3rd, many observers dismissed the notion of a Trump presidency, arguing a GOP win with Trump on the ticket was an impossibility.

CNN’s Elzie Lee Granderson, for example, openly suggested the GOP “give up” on the 2016 election and focus on 2020.

“[W]hat the Republican Party needs to do is go ahead and bite the bullet for 2016 and not hitch their wagon to Donald Trump and just say ‘we're going to lose 2016’”.

The polling in late March and early April tended to give credence to such views, with Clinton amassing a whopping double digit lead over Trump. According to the RealClearPolitics average of polls, Clinton led Trump by 11.4 points, 50.4% to 39.0% in late March.

Trump gradually narrowed the gap, however, and with a substantial bounce after last week’s Republican National Convention, the GOP nominee has surged past Clinton, turning a 6-point lead for the former Secretary of State into a 1-point advantage in the average of polls for the Manhattan billionaire. As of Tuesday evening, Trump leads the former New York Senator 45.6 to 44.7.

Five of the last seven head-to-head matchup polls show Trump leading Clinton. Some, like the latest CNN/ORC poll, show massive reversals, with a 7-point Clinton advantage in a mid-July CNN poll becoming a 3-point Trump lead in the CNN survey published this week.

But Trump isn’t just leading in the polls. For the first time since FiveThirtyEight began analyzing presidential polling in 2008, the polling aggregator gives the Republican nominee an edge in the “now-cast” voting predictor, which estimates the likely outcome of the election if it were held today.

The “now-cast” predictor now gives Trump a 54.2% chance of beating Clinton if the election were held today, a sharp increase from the 32.3% chance prior to the Republican National Convention and a 13.8% chance in mid-June.

According to the index, Trump would likely win 290 electoral votes to Clinton’s 248, with the GOP nominee retaining all of the states won by Mitt Romney in 2012 and adding Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Hampshire, Iowa, Nevada, and Maine’s 2nd congressional district, which awards its electoral vote separately from the rest of the state.

By comparison, Mitt Romney never led in the “now-cast” index, peaking at 43.9% in mid-October, following a strong performance in the first presidential debate.

Despite his recent surge in the polls, however, the betting markets still favor Clinton by roughly 2-1, with an aggregate of odds on Election Betting Odds giving Trump just a 32.5% chance of beating Mrs. Clinton in November. While betting odds have often been reliable predictors for elections, they failed badly in this year’s Brexit vote, give strong odds in favor of “remain” despite polling showing a last-minute surge for “leave”.

Historically, both parties typically have enjoyed post-convention bounces, and candidates who did not – like Mitt Romney – typically lost in November.

While the effects of the ongoing backlash within the Democratic Party against revelations the Democratic National Committee worked to prevent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders from securing the nomination are unclear, they have the potential to leave the party fractured in November and distract from the convention itself. That could deprive Clinton of the much-needed convention bounce that put Trump ahead in the polls.