Gary Johnson averaged just 7 percentage points in 11 polls1 released on Thursday, continuing a string of bad results for the Libertarian Party nominee. At the same time, the number of undecided voters appears to be falling. Those two trends are combining to remove some of the uncertainty in our forecasts — historically, the number of undecided and third-party voters has been strongly correlated with both polling volatility and polling error.

The share of voters not supporting the major-party candidates remains higher than it was at this point in the 2012 campaign, for example, but the more it shrinks, the safer Hillary Clinton’s lead becomes.

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Harry Enten from Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight explains why a shrinking number of undecideds and third party voters bodes well for Hillary Clinton.

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