title:  Here’s How The Trump Campaign Can Still Win And Why They Probably Won’t
text: Dubbed the  missing white voters,  Nate Silver s FiveThirtyEight wrote an in depth analysis of what Donald Trump needs to do in order to win: Register between 5 to 47 million white voters starting now until election day.Here s a scary stat for Democrats: In 2012, President Obama won re-election by almost 5 million votes, but about 47 million eligible white voters without a college degree   including 24 million men   didn t bother to vote. In 2016, these nonvoters are part of the demographic that is most strongly in favor of Donald Trump.If Trump rouses even a fraction of these notoriously disaffected Americans   like this grease-smudged, 61-year-old first-time voter in western Pennsylvania   he could surge to victory. There s just one catch: If we re on the cusp of a blue-collar Great Awakening, it s not yet showing up in the registration data.In other words, Trump has all this support from this major demographic that could deliver him to a landslide victory   but they aren t registered. These  missing  white voters are literally the key to Donald Trump s success, and they hold the key to the swing state vote:If Trump were able to activate merely one of every eight of these  missing whites  to vote for him, he would wipe out Obama s 2012 margins in three states   Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania   and win both the Electoral College and the popular vote. If he were able to activate one of every five, he could add Virginia, Nevada, Iowa and New Hampshire.So, in order to merely  catch up  to President Obama, Trump needs to register at least 5 million more people. Considering registration among nonwhite voters (who overwhelmingly favor Hillary Clinton) is up in battleground states like Pennsylvania and North Carolina (compared to white registrants), and Clinton is gaining with white women, Trump has even more to go.If Trump hopes to overtake Obama s numbers in the crucial swing states, he better hurry up.The voting registration deadlines in Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio are on October 11, less than two weeks away. In less than three weeks, Virginia and Nevada will reach their deadlines, October 18.Here are the dates of individual state deadlines.In other words, the Trump campaign has 18 days to register at least 5 million white voters in 5 swing states, which translates to 277,777 voters a day.Considering his horrendous excuse for a ground game, that won t be an easy feat.As of right now, Democrats have the upper hand in Pennsylvania and Virginia, where metropolitan, non-white registrants are trouncing rural whites.FiveThirtyEight finds that Trump s shoddy ground game, mixed with laziness enabled by the RNC, hurt his chances greatly:So what s going on? It could be that Trump is motivating slightly more new voters against him than for him. Or, perhaps more likely, it could be that white working class voters are out there to be activated, but Trump s campaign and the Republican National Committee have waited until too late to build the analytics and ground infrastructure necessary to identify and register them. That s where Clinton and the Democrats have excelled.So with less than three weeks to go until more than half the states end the registration process, the Trump campaign has already hit a wall (no pun intended). Democrats shouldn t get too excited. The chances that a massive voter turnout on election day could propel Trump to the presidency is a possibility. Democrats need to keep up their registration efforts, and launch a Get Out the Vote movement of equal or better proportions.Featured image via Spencer Platt/Getty Images