title:  Don’t Freak Out – Clinton’s Odds Of Beating Trump Are 3 To 1
text: It s still a few months before the election, so the media has to keep us interested by telling us it s an up and down horse race. Recent polls show Donald Trump neck and neck with Hillary Clinton (okay, done with the horse metaphors), but reality paints a much different picture. Recent models show that Clinton has a 3 to 1 chance of winning.For example, the most recent NBC poll shows that Clinton and Trump are virtually tied.The New York Times  Upshot examines state by state polling, rather than overall polling. They also take past results into account. With our electoral college, polling a national sampling can be wildly inaccurate, yet that s what most pollsters do.Their prediction? It s not a lock for Clinton, but they say her chances of winning are 76 percent to 24 percent for Trump. Read their article. There are a lot of fascinating interactive charts. In essence, though, Clinton has 945 ways to win. Trump has 72.The always sane Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com agrees, kind of. Silver acknowledges that Clinton s lead is now down to just 3 or 4 points, which is kind of frightening, but according to Silver, there s a 35 to 40 percent chance that Trump can pull it out. What s particularly disconcerting about that, though, is that Clinton has about the same lead in the polls that John Kerry did in 2004, and we all know how that election turned out.One big unknown is whether the spate of violence by and toward the police will continue. Right now, the Republican party is waging an effective campaign of telling Americans that we are in a race war and the only way for the majority (white people) to win, is by voting for Donald Trump. Then again, there are those of us who believe that the way to start a race war is to elect Trump.Featured image of Hillary Clinton by Alex Wong at Getty Images | Featured image of Donald Trump by Will McNamee at Getty Images