NOTA and No Opinion should be much larger for those who have not yet voted. One of the reasons people have not voted early is that they still don’t know whom to vote for.
The NOTA/no opinion percent should be much larger in Sept and early October and gradually decline as people make up their mind.
One of the major reasons Clinton is given the edge is that she (allegedly) has a massive ground game. A major role of an effective ground game is to help the undecided decide. Trump (allegedly) has no ground game, let alone an effective ground game.
By not showing a larger undecided percent, the polls, in effect, have already factored in Clinton’s ground game to be effective in moving the undecided.
Ground games are a necessary part of a win. But they are limited by other campaign factors. In GA in 2014 the Ds had a massive, well funded, well run ground game for Nunn against Perdue. In Oct 2014 I predicted Nunn would come close due to that ground game.
Many co-workers and neighbors who had been reliable D voters in 2006 and 2010 told me they would not vote for Nunn because they were p’d over higher insurance premiums and higher deductibles for less coverage.
I was proven wrong. The well funded, well staffed 2014 ground game in GA was ineffective. Now in 2016 there is no D ground game in GA. That same funding and staff has left GA for FL and NC. It will be interesting to see if the massive D ground game in FL and NC can be effective given the climate of the voters in the areas their ground game is targeting.
The primary role of the ground game is to get your voters to the polls.
While I do understand the effect and importance of the ground game, this election is like no other.
No one had the ground game of ted Cruz, that is part of the reason his followers were so hard headed in coming over.
Trump made this a different type of a race,
He truly is the outsider who knows how the other side works. They are sleazy, and being from the wrong side of the tracks, he is like the vast number of Americans ans even though I was a huge Cruzer, I do identify with Trump.
So having a strong ground game is nullified by Trumps normal one of the guys pesonal. That is something that a normal political ground game cannot over come, as Cruz found out.
Trumps ground game is that HE IS ONE OF US. He just did better with what he started with than we did.
He leaked interview tape with Bush actually helped him with mus crude and rude Americans. The woman, like it or not, many like that bad boy image. Nice guys always bitch and complain that the girls go for the bad boy, not the nice boy.
Benjamin Franklyn as a womanizer and he was a bit rude and crude, yet the European socialites loved him. It was, the American persona, and trump is the quintessential American male.
Look, in internal polling I found that trump actually beats Clinton with women. If you look at the NBC Wall Street Journal poll portion O posted you will see they had to over sample women by 6% to give Hillary an edge over Trump. That and and oversampling of democrats and Independents.
There was an article I posted to FR about 3 weeks ago that showed they actually over sample black women and under sampled black men to give Hillary the edge over trump in women overall.
In their own poll they had trump beating Hillary with white women, but losing to her in women over all. You can only do that if you over sample minorities which the did in their polling.