As we have done since 2004, we are taking a polls-only approach to give a daily snapshot of the race – as well as a November prediction. This approach has an effective precision of a few tenths of a percentage point of public opinion, and performs very well as both a tracker and a forecast. Currently, the probability of a Hillary Clinton victory in November is 85 percent, based on polls alone.

Today, I give a brief tour of the computational approach.

The Meta-Analysis starts with a Python script that downloads recent state polls from the Huffington Post’s Pollster operation. Thanks to Natalie Jackson, the HuffPollster team, and dozens of pollsters for this stream of information, which forms the foundation of the calculation.

Where polls are not available, we use the election result from 2012. As I have written, this year’s Clinton-versus-Trump state polls are strongly correlated with 2012′s Obama-versus-Romney polls. Because no realignment is evident, past results are a good predictor of the likely outcome this year. At the moment, no more than fourteen states are genuinely in play.

Hillary Clinton will travel to Atlantic City on Wednesday to attack Donald Trump for what a campaign official called the “wake of destruction” his business dealings left in the seaside resort.

Trump casinos went through bankruptcy twice in the 1990s, and his companies left a legion of local contractors hanging with their bills unpaid. Clinton also is expected to talk about Trump University, a venture that promised to teach people the secrets of real-estate wealth and is now the subject of lawsuits for fraud.

The location and time of Clinton’s Atlantic City appearance have not yet been finalized, the campaign said. The former secretary of state is also scheduled to campaign in Scranton on Friday with Vice President Biden.

Foreign leaders have made no secret of their disdain for Donald Trump — and now French President Francois Hollande has made it explicit, endorsing Hillary Clinton for the White House.

"The best thing the Democrats can do is to get Hillary Clinton elected," Hollande wrote in a column for a French newspaper, according to a translation by Politico.

Trump, meanwhile, offers slogans that are "barely different from the extreme right in Europe and in France," and electing him “would complicate relations between Europe and the U.S.," Hollande wrote.

It is unusual for a foreign leader to make such an explicit endorsement in a U.S. presidential election.

...It wasn’t an easy decision. As a conservative, I find Hillary Clinton stands for the opposite of a number of things I believe strongly: that our government is involved in too many areas of our lives, that its profligacy is spending our country into bankruptcy, and that it very often makes problems worse because it knows too little to keep pace with change. Clinton has a seemingly inexhaustible list of government programs to address every social concern, and no conceivable way to pay for it all.

So, I have deep misgivings about a Clinton presidency, but the anguish of British voters who cast a protest vote thinking it wouldn’t matter — that their vote wouldn’t be decisive — convinced me that something much bigger is at stake in this election. The unthinkable, I realized, was actually possible this year. In the British referendum, major polling firms had the “Remain” vote leading by as much as 8 percent. As little as five hours before results were announced, betting markets gave Remain a 96 percent chance of success. And I realized I didn’t want to wake up on November 9 to find Donald Trump elected president and wish I had done more to prevent it.

As one of the signatories of the national security experts’ “never Trump” letter, I genuinely believe the erratic statements Donald Trump has made would be disastrous if adopted as American policies. His candidacy is itself bad for our country: after watching him win primary after primary, our allies have already begun questioning the durability of long-standing American commitments. Governments reliant on our security guarantees, already worried by President Barack Obama’s passivity in “leading from behind,” see the presumptive Republican nominee taking even more reckless stances. They’re understandably hedging their bets. Regaining the confidence of America’s friends in the world will be the work of more than one presidency.

It is impossible to imagine Donald Trump doing the things an American leader is called to do in an insecure world: steadying an American ally after a terrorist attack (as President Bush did after the 7/7 attacks in London), reconfiguring foreign assistance to reward good governance (as President Bush did with the Millennium Challenge Accounts), making hard decisions to reinforce an ally being intimidated (as President Clinton did for Taiwan in 1996, sending two carrier battle groups to counter Chinese bullying), or consoling gold star families when their dead are returned home from the war (as President Bush did, privately and prayerfully).

... There is our country’s post-imperial reluctance to let go of the idea that we are a great nation, combined with our post-second-world-war delusion that we were still a great power. That was why we refused the chance to join the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951, and our infatuation with our own greatness was sufficiently undamaged by Suez in 1956 to make us refuse to join the EEC when that got going with the Treaty of Rome in 1958. If we’d committed ourselves to Europe early, with everyone else, we’d now have a much deeper understanding of our real relationship to the continent, namely that we belong there.

Then there was General de Gaulle’s double “Non” in 1963 and 1967, which kept us out when we finally thought it might be a good idea to join. Goodness knows what the source of his hostility was, but it wouldn’t be at all surprising if his notoriously prickly character was still harbouring some ancient resentment from his treatment by this country during the war.

But if we’d had the chance to join early, we could have had a much greater influence on the way the European project developed, and we’d feel much more at home in it now. Instead, we were bewitched (some of our leaders still are) by the fantasy of the “special relationship”, invented by Winston Churchill and entirely ignored by the other party to it, the US. Caught up in the glamour of this imaginary nonsense, toadying, deluded, we’ve been facing the wrong way for the past 70 years.
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But the most immediate cause of the disaster this country suffered last night was the flippant, careless, irresponsible way David Cameron tried to buy off the right wing of his own party by offering them a referendum. I don’t think that device should have any place at all in a parliamentary democracy: it slips far too easily into a sort of raucous populism. We elect MPs so that they can have the time and the resources to make important decisions. That’s what they should do.

But then, if we had a properly thought-out constitution instead of a cobwebbed, rotten, diseased and decaying mess of a patched-up, cobbled-together, bloated, corrupted, leaking and stinking hulk, we wouldn’t have come to this point anyway. We desperately need fundamental change. But who can bring us that now?

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton chastised Republican lawmakers on Sunday for a “paralyzed” Congress, saying they’ve fueled populist anger by refusing to “do their job.”

Clinton ticked off a list of items that GOP congressional leaders have refused to schedule for a vote. They include a proposed immigration overhaul, holding confirmation hearings to fill a Supreme Court vacancy, and strengthening background checks and banning firearms sales to people on the government no-fly list.

Her remarks come as voter unrest has fueled the outsider candidacies of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, as well as her Democratic primary opponent, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

“Leaders in Congress refuse to act on a wide range of issues that really matter to American working families,” Clinton said during an address to the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Indianapolis.

Democrats on the House Benghazi panel said in a report on Monday that security at the Libya facility the night of 11 September 2012 was “woefully inadequate”, but former secretary of state Hillary Clinton never personally denied any requests from diplomats for additional protection.

The panel’s five Democrats said after a two-year investigation that the military could not have done anything differently on the night of the attacks to save the lives of four Americans killed in Libya. US ambassador Chris Stevens died in one of the two assaults that night at the US outpost and CIA annex.

Democrats’ release of their own report heightened the partisanship of the inquiry, which has been marked by accusations of Obama administration stonewalling and finger-pointing. Republicans on the panel missed a self-imposed deadline to issue a report “before summer”, but the Democrats’ move in issuing their report could spur the GOP’s final product.
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The Democrats said they regretted that their 344-page report was not bipartisan, but said Republicans left them little choice after conducting “one of the longest and most partisan congressional investigations in history”.

CINCINNATI -- Presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is holding one public event during her stay in Cincinnati. The event -- held Monday at Union Terminal -- will be Clinton's first with possible Vice President pick Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

On Sunday, Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley held a private fundraising event for Clinton at his home.

Follow the event in our live blog below, giving you the latest updates from our reporters in the field. (The blog may take a few seconds to load).

... A new survey of Cosmopolitan.com readers, conducted in partnership with John Della Volpe, CEO of SocialSphere and director of polling at the Harvard Institute for Politics, reveals that many young women are unconvinced by Trump's claims that his business acumen will serve the country better than Clinton's extensive political record — and most agree that Clinton, not Trump, has the qualities necessary to succeed as president.

The survey of nearly 1,200 women between the ages of 18 and 34 who said they are highly likely to vote in the upcoming election, selected randomly from among Cosmopolitan.com newsletter subscribers, shows that while 63 percent of likely voters say Clinton's political experience is a net positive, 64 percent view Trump's lack of experience as a net negative.

Sixty-six percent of likely voters in the survey said that if the election were held today, they would vote for Clinton, while 25 percent said they would vote for Trump, and 9 percent were undecided. Political independents — who constituted 51 percent of likely voters — also exhibited strong support for Clinton, with 63 percent saying they would vote for her if the election were held today.

The findings revealed deep skepticism and anxiety among Cosmopolitan.com readers about Trump's ability to govern. For likely voters like Rachel Wakser, 30, a quality assurance analyst living in Texas, Clinton's imperfections as a candidate were balanced by her decades of experience in politics, as First Lady, Secretary of State, and New York senator. "You can look at Hillary's record and see what she's accomplished, how she's voted — politics is an industry, and she knows how it works," Wakser, who is supporting Clinton, said. "What does Trump have? A record as a reality TV star and a businessman. How is he going to be able to get anything done? He's a very skilled negotiator, as he likes to remind us, but this isn't business. It's our lives and our country."