I have been saying for some time that i think this election will be quite close. Economic indicators, recent electoral precedent, the difficulty of pulling off a Presidential hat-trick and the polarization of the parties all point to a pretty narrow contest.

There is a lot of panic going around in Democratic and Progressive circles right now about the momentum Trump is gaining. But there are two reasons i’m not terribly concerned about this. Or more accurately, no more concerned than i have been since Trump’s nomination.

Firstly, most of his support seems to be coming from a rising percentage of Republicans swinging at last behind his candidacy. As election day draws ever nearer, the anti-trump holdouts in the Republican base are being forced into the stark choice of abandoning their traditional home in the Red team and going Blue. And most seem to have balked at the prospect. Clinton is not losing ground so much as Trump is gaining it as previously ‘undecided’ voters who lean Republican fall in line.

The map supports this analysis. The states where Trump has had the biggest gains over the last week are those swing states that trend more Republican, such as Ohio and Florida where he now appears to have a small lead.

This is bad for Clinton, as these are the kind of people she was trying to attract to her candidacy. But you can’t please all the people all the time, and she has attracted meaningful support from groups like college educated white voters who usually vote Republican by a large margin. So it is not really a sign of failure as much as a measure of how negatively party supporters view the opposing side. Even Trump can’t convince these people to vote Democratic.

Secondly, the advantage of having more viable paths to 270 electoral votes is that it aids you in close contests. For instance, Trump can’t really win without Pennsylvania where he is still behind. Whereas Clinton really doesn’t need Pennsylvania that badly anymore. She can win with Virginia, Colorado and North Carolina while losing the Keystone State.

It seems clear to me that Clinton’s map is receding back towards a more normal Democratic victory in the mode of ’08 or ’12. Trump takes Ohio, Florida, Iowa and Arizona (the more Republican leaning swing states) where Clinton was only really ahead by a large margin when Trump was at his lowest ebb.

Trump winning Georgia and Arizona is not something we should be terribly concerned about. Those states were never core parts of Clinton’s strategy and usually vote solidly Republican. This is in a real sense Trump returning to the baseline performance expected from those areas. The fact his hold on them is still so tenuous is an indictment of his weakness as a candidate.

So yes, the race is tightening. But no, that is not cause for panic. As far as i can tell we are still tracking the outcome that conventional wisdom should always have predicted. A moderate Clinton victory based on high support from Hispanic voters and college educated whites.

That is consistent with what we are seeing. Clinton is over-performing in states with arge college-educated and minority populations and under-performing in states with higher shares of non-college educated White voters (Trump’s base). That is why Ohio looks more red than Virginia right now, even though that is the opposite of how it used to be.

Also, don’t expect polls to all be consistent. If you are ahead by four points (as it seems plausible Clinton currently is) you should expect some polls to show you a little behind and some to show you far ahead once you account for margin of error and differing methodologies amongst pollsters.

But it ain’t over yet. There is still a week before the election. They tell me the world was created in less.