Trump has a path to 270 but no vehicle to get there

Second, Trump has to avoid losing any state that Mitt Romney carried four years ago. That won’t be easy. He has only tenuous holds on North Carolina (1.8-point lead in the two-way), Arizona (2.2) and Georgia (4.5). Clinton is also hoping to snag the electoral vote available in Omaha, Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District (which may come in handy if Trump takes New Hampshire). While no recent polling exists, CNN’s political director just classified the district as a toss-up.

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Most importantly, does Trump have enough of a get-out-the-vote operation to win all races that may come down to a few thousand votes?

Last week, the Los Angeles Times deemed the competing ground games a mismatch, with the Clinton campaign running twice as many field offices and utilizing cutting-edge technology that personalizes outreach to unlikely but Democratic-leaning voters. Yale political scientist Eitan Hersh told the newspaper that the discrepancy could amount to as much as three extra points for Clinton in battleground states.

Trump, by contrast, has outsourced his GOTV efforts to the Republican National Committee as part of its support for various down-ballot candidates, many of whom have expressed little solicitude for Trump. In Nevada and Florida, Republican Senate nominees Joe Heck and Marco Rubio, respectively, are pursuing Latino voters far more adroitly than Trump is. Time and money the RNC spends on reaching those voters is time and money that isn’t helping Trump.

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