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The 270 Project: Try To Predict Who Will Win The Election

Published
Asma Khalid

Donald Trump has staked his brand on winning. “We will have so much winning,” he has said in this campaign, “if I get elected, that you may get bored with winning.” But can he win the presidential election? In a country that has changed rapidly demographically, Trump’s best shot is to drive up turnout among white voters, especially white men. But how likely is that? We at NPR Politics wanted a data-driven, quantitative way to answer the fundamental question of whether Trump can win, or if this is Hillary Clinton’s race to lose — and give readers the power to test it out themselves. There’s perhaps no better way to do that than through demographics. It’s by no means a crystal ball, but how we identify is arguably among the best predictors of how we will vote. So we created The 270 Project, a handy tool where you can adjust voter turnout and margin of victory for five demographic groups — white women, white men, African-Americans, Latinos and others (Asian, Native American, mixed race) — to see what it would take for Trump or Clinton to win. (The project derives its name from the number of electoral votes needed to win the White House — 270.) Give it a shot and see what you come up with.

 

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