Will demographics sink Donald Trump?

In this scenario, Trump does worse than Romney with Hispanics – his vote share is knocked down to 20 percent and Hispanic turnout increases by five points (assuming that Hispanics would be energized and turn out in large numbers to vote against Trump). We keep the reversion-to-the-mean with black voters, increase his white vote share to 64 percent and keep everything else at 2012 levels. Note that this is a pretty high bar for the Republican share of the white vote. The last candidate to exceed it was Ronald Reagan, who won 66 percent of the white vote in his blowout 1984 re-election. And if Trump has trouble winning college-educated whites, it will be difficult for him to get to that level with whites overall.

But if Trump were to get numbers like these, our calculator estimates that he would narrowly win the popular vote and either win or come close to winning in a number of blue-leaning Rust Belt states.

The third scenario – which I call the “Racial Minority Nosedive” – is probably the most commonly floated scenario among analysts today. In this case, Trump performs poorly with both African-Americans and Hispanics, but analysts haven’t come to a consensus on exactly how well or poorly he would do with white voters. That’s why I made this map interactive – so you can try out different scenarios and see what the results would look like.