The polling averages between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton should move 4 or 5 percent by the end of this week, but it is not likely Trump will be ahead in the race, Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said Wednesday.
"As you know, the Trump people don't believe in these polls," Sabato told Fox News' "America's Newsroom" co-host Martha MacCallum. "I hear that daily and get emails and tweets about it, and that's fine. But I don't rely on individual polls."
Clinton's numbers spiked over the weekend, when voters were reacting to a 2005 tape revealing Trump talking explicitly about women, said Sabato, but she has held "more or less" a consistent lead of 3 to 5 points over Trump, and that will likely continue.
Meanwhile, Sabato called the news a quarter of Republicans who are either governors or members of Congress either do not endorse Trump, or are staying away from the fracas is an "extraordinarily high number," and will make it hard for them to win reelection.
"It's heads you lose, tails you lose," Sabato said. "Either way you will alienate a portion of the electorate you need to get elected or reelected, unless you are in a heavily red district."
As for Republicans in a "competitive purple district or state" or in a Democratic state, "good luck to them," Sabato said.
Fox News' latest electoral college map places Clinton with 307 votes and Trump at 187, while Sabato's map awards a projected 341 electoral votes, both surpassing the 270 needed to be elected president, and Sabato said Fox's map is "perfectly reasonable."
"I have some differences with it, and the Crystal Ball puts Arizona in Trump's camp and North Carolina and Ohio barely in the Clinton camp," Sabato said. "She is a little bit ahead, and that's a flip for Ohio.
"Some of these states are spinning like tops. We have 27 days to go, and I guarantee you some states will switch sides, we just don't know which ones yet."
However, Sabato does not think Trump's poll ratings would be higher if House Speaker Paul Ryan and other Republicans were fully behind the nominee.