Trump Has Just a 25 Percent Chance but Could Win, Polling Analyst Says

— -- The 2016 election shows that paying attention to polls may be more important than ever, according to FiveThirtyEight’s senior political writer and analyst, Harry Enten.

He said Hillary Clinton has about a 75 percent chance of winning the general election, according to FiveThirtyEight’s polls-plus model, which uses national and state polls along with other demographic and economic measures.

But that could change, Enten said on ABC’s “Powerhouse Politics” podcast.

“There’s a reason why we don’t have Hillary Clinton as a 100 percent chance of winning the election,” he said. “If the economy went south, Donald Trump would have a better chance of winning.”

Reflecting on the 2016 primary process, Enten told ABC News’ deputy political director, Shushannah Walshe, and correspondent Brad Mielke that Americans ought to keep a close eye on opinion polls. Enten said one takeaway from the primaries is that Americans should “trust the polls more than our intuition and perhaps more than other fundamentals in the past that have been more reliable indicators.”

“Donald Trump jumped out to a lead in the polls fairly early on,” Enten said. But people were dismissing Trump’s campaign, and “we were like, ‘Oh, no, it’s too early. We shouldn’t trust the polls.’”

Despite her strong prospects for winning the election, Enten said, Americans should not take a Clinton victory for granted. “We give Donald Trump about a 25 percent chance of winning the election,” he said, referring to FiveThirtyEight’s forecast. But he said things with a 25 percent chance of occurring “happen all the time.”

He said he does not expect the Department of Justice's decision this week not to pursue charges against Clinton for using private email servers during her tenure as secretary of state to change Americans' views of her or Trump.

“Most people already don’t believe Hillary Clinton on any number of issues,” he said, citing her polling numbers for honesty and trustworthiness, and “most people see Donald Trump as a blowhard.”

“These are two historically flawed candidates,” Enten said. “Right now, more Americans are choosing the lesser of two evils in Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump.”

Enten noted how other candidates are faring in this election cycle. “We have seen the third-party candidates doing better than we’ve traditionally seen third-party candidates doing,” but because there are “very few true independents” in the electorate, “I don’t think it should be too surprising that, at least at this point, [Libertarian Party candidate] Gary Johnson and [Green Party candidate] Jill Stein aren’t polling all that well” against Clinton and Trump.