But it’s really only one of the few ways she can lose this race. So why shouldn’t they defend it?  I thought it was strange that it wasn’t in their original ad campaign.  Toni Right. When you do this mapping exercise, you realize how important Pennsylvania is. (The G.O.P. last won Pennsylvania in 1988.) In a close election, it seems crucial to Trump. Without it, he has to win all of those five swing states we talked about earlier: Ohio, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Iowa, Nevada. Let’s assume those will be 50-50 states. If you flip a coin five times and hope to get five straight heads, your odds are just over 3 percent. But that’s what Trump would need in this case.  Nate And it’s not just a coin flip. Those five states are really different.  Toni For one thing, Nevada, with a fairly large Hispanic population, is thought to lean to the left. But I’m curious about your take on New Hampshire. As you showed in your article Monday, it has plenty of working-class whites. But then consider that it’s right in the middle of a liberal region. Sure, New Hampshire has a long history of conservatism. But over time, people migrate from neighboring liberal states, like New York and Vermont. And that slowly takes New Hampshire toward the left.  Nate Well, New Hampshire has tended to move slightly to the left. But I think it may be a mistake to assume that Clinton can hold recent levels of Democratic support among white working-class people in the Northeast, even in New England.  Toni I also think back to how Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat, hung on against Scott Brown in the New Hampshire Senate race in 2014. It was close, but she held him off against the grain of a dominant midterm year for Republicans.  Nate Well, Scott Brown was an out-of-state candidate.  Toni You’re calling him a carpetbagger?  Nate If you think that term applies outside of the South, then absolutely.  Look, the southeastern part of New Hampshire — where most of the people vote — is decidedly middle class. It’s very moderate. It has a long history of supporting conservatives in a variety of contexts. It was great for both Scott Brown and Donald Trump in the primary. Western New Hampshire really has become eastern Vermont at this point, thanks in part to the sort of migration trends you’ve referred to among liberal expats.  Toni We shouldn’t skip over this part of our maps: You and I put states like Virginia and Colorado into the Clinton camp. [Update: Clinton has stopped advertising in Colorado]. The demographics work well for Clinton in those two states, and the polling has been positive for her. That’s a big deal if it holds up.  But we also made Wisconsin blue. And yet Wisconsin’s demographics aren’t that much different from Iowa’s.  Democrats are dependent on white working-class voters in the Midwest, but Republicans are dependent on minorities and well-educated voters in the Sun Belt.  Demographic groups as a share of the vote for Barack Obama or Mitt Romney in 2012  White Republicans with a degree and Hispanics  White Democrats without a degree  Demographic groups as a share of the vote for Barack Obama or Mitt Romney in 2012  White Dems. without a degree  Reps. who are Hispanic or whites with a degree  And Iowa seems to be a true tossup state, based on polling.  Nate Those two states don’t look very different in terms of those demographic numbers. If it weren’t for the polling data and the Clinton campaign’s behavior (no advertising in Wisconsin), I’d be inclined to say that Wisconsin’s a battleground, too. But we do have a lot of polling there, and it all tends to indicate that Clinton has a more comfortable lead than what we’ve seen in Iowa.  This doesn’t really show up in the simple demographic numbers, but I would note that Trump was extremely weak in the Milwaukee suburbs in the primary. That’s the heart of the Republican base there, and I think he probably has a lot of work among those voters to become competitive.  If I were the Clinton campaign, I would still entertain airing advertisements in the Green Bay, La Crosse and Wausau media markets.  Our real-time analysis of the third night of the Democratic National Convention, featuring Joseph R. Biden Jr., Michael Bloomberg, Barack Obama and Tim Kaine.  Toni People rage about a certain procedural issue during a campaign, then tend to forget about it once it’s over. But we should briefly review the recent change to the superdelegate system for Democrats. The Clinton and Sanders camps agreed to a deal, and the Democratic rules committee voted to bind roughly two-thirds of the superdelegates to state results, significantly cutting their influence.  When you think of a strong superdelegate system, I think some Republicans would say that the nation never needed it more than in this election cycle. And yet the Democrats are making this change.  Nate Ha. The Republican race would have been so different if they had Democratic rules on proportionality and superdelegates.  Who knows where it would have ended up? But it would have been very different for Trump.  If I were proposing the rules for either party, I’d probably eliminate superdelegates as a standard element of the process but put triggers in place to make them available in the event that they were needed — to resolve a deadlocked convention, if someone were indicted or killed, if there were reason to think that the early primary results were unrepresentative (say, a new candidate jumps in the race).  The two triggers: No candidate gets a majority of pledged delegates (either heading into the convention or on the first ballot); two-thirds of superdelegates vote to give themselves a vote on the floor.  I think that would be a high-enough bar that no one would presume that they were going to decide the race under anything other than extraordinary circumstances.  Toni It’s hard not to peek at polling numbers now, even though we know that they tend to be less predictive because of bounces during convention season. But does anything stand out to you about recent numbers you’ve seen?  Nate Not really. It looks like a fairly typical bounce that has left a tied race or a slight Trump lead. There are still a lot of undecided voters, and there aren’t many polls showing Trump near 50 percent. We’ll see where we are in a few weeks.  Toni It happened: Bernie Sanders gave Hillary Clinton his full support at the convention. (Never in doubt, right?) Any final thoughts on whether the Bernie holdouts might come around in the end?  Nate Well, I think the remaining Bernie holdouts are a diverse bunch. There are conservative white men who disapprove of Obama and Clinton, but still consider themselves Democrats.  There are people on the ideological left who might not ever come around; I’d guess a bunch of them didn’t vote for Obama in 2012. I’d guess these are the Bernie or Bust folks at the convention.  The biggest group, though, might be young voters who don’t trust Clinton very much. I think a lot will come around.  In recent weeks, Nate and Toni discussed how much conventions really matter, and looked at the groups that Donald Trump would win if the election were held today.  And for more on maps, Vox has an article on how Trump supporters envision things turning out — they are very optimistic.
A 269-269 tie in the Electoral College would be decided in the House, and why the Clinton campaign is now trying harder to defend Pennsylvania.