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

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.