Despite the recent spate of great news in national and state polls for Donald Trump, there lurks a potential pitfall below the surface, writes Juan Williams in
The Hill.
Much has been made of the swing states that will likely play crucial roles in the November election — Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida — and the poll numbers showing Trump neck-and-neck with or even leading Hillary Clinton in those states. That is creating a swell of excitement with Team Trump and his supporters.
But winning the White House via taking the key swing states is based on the assumption that Trump will win every state that Romney took in 2012, and Williams cautions that would be a dangerous mistake to make.
"A Trump-Clinton matchup will dramatically expand the electoral playing field beyond Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania — in Clinton's favor," Williams writes.
The most recent polls show Clinton and Trump in a dead heat in Georgia and Arizona, two states GOP nominees have counted on in past elections, The Hill reports.
And the wild card is the Hispanic vote. In Arizona, for example, 30 percent of the voters in the general election will be Hispanic.
To get to the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House, Trump would need to:
- Win Arizona and Georgia.
- Take the rest of the Romney states.
- Win the battleground states of Virginia, Pennsylvania and Florida.
- Still find 64 more electoral votes.
"The polls are hiding some hard truths about what it will take for Trump to win the White House. The electoral college battlefield is forbidding," Williams writes.
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