US election: Clinton momentum to carry her over the line

Donald Trump walks off the stage after holding a rally in Leesburg, Virginia.

You can take it to the bank — the American election is effectively all over, Hillary Clinton has won.

She is ahead in the polls and every technical, financial and logistic advantage lies with her.

Donald Trump has given everyone a tremendous fright, but he cannot pull off victory from here.

As The Australian went to press, the RealClearPolitics national poll of polls put Clinton 1.8 per cent ahead. It is impossible to win the national popular vote by that much and lose the presidency.

The more sophisticated polls work hard to survey “likely voters” and it would be unprecedented for so many polls to be so wrong.

Not only that, more than 37 million Americans have voted ­already. Most of them voted when Clinton was well ahead in the polls.

There is also a huge surge in the early votes of Hispanics, especially in the swing states of Florida and Nevada. If Clinton wins Florida, Trump cannot win the presidency. Trump based his campaign on ­demonising Mexicans. Hispanics are not rushing to the polls to vote for the Republican.

If Clinton wins Nevada, it is also extremely hard for Trump.

To win the presidency, Trump needs to win almost every battleground state, including states such as Pennsylvania where he has ­always been behind.

The black vote is down on last time, and that’s disappointing for Clinton. But she has vastly more money than Trump and more than twice as many field offices as the Republican.

All those field offices will be driving elderly and poor voters to the polls.

Clinton is also vastly outspending Trump in last-minute advertising in the critical states.

In truth, this election has been over for weeks. The FBI ­announcement a week and a half ago that it was reopening the investigation into Clinton’s bizarre use of a private email server when she was secretary of state gave Trump a bounce, but didn’t really change the momentum of the race.

Yesterday’s announcement that the FBI was now giving Clinton the all-clear for a second time probably did her no good, and not much harm. Any mention of the emails is bad for Clinton.

The media has got a bit confused about the extent of Trump’s support because it has confused a bounce with a momentum change.

Candidates get bounces from their conventions — as both ­candidates did this time — and from discrete events. But to change momentum an event has to have a long, long half-life, or fundamentally change the way people think about a candidate, or change the assessment voters have of how a candidate will affect their lives.

Weird, bad tempered and at times vile as this campaign has been, nothing has really changed the underlying momentum. ­Clinton has had a consistent poll lead for months. Even at his peak, Trump was a couple of percentage points behind Clinton.

One other thing commentators are getting wrong is the likely ­financial impact if Trump pulls off a miracle and does win. Markets hate uncertainty and get jittery about it. But provided Trump, if elected, makes responsible and ­reassuring statements, and ­announces one or two key credible appointments, the markets will conclude, as they did in the wake of Brexit, that the physical universe has not changed and they will wait to see what happens.

But they won’t have to exercise even this much forbearance, ­because Trump is going to lose. You can bank on it.