New Poll Shows Clinton Has Stopped Bleeding Vs Trump
We are, remarkably, at the 160-day mark until the presidential election, a stretch of time that is simultaneously a ton of time (months and months) and shockingly brief (on the scale of a campaign that began in late 2014). That’s 160 days, 3,840 or so hours, during which Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump need to (a) solidify their bases of support and (b) appeal to voters who may be wavering.
One hundred sixty days during which Trump needs to either gain a majority of support from American voters or at least gain the upper hand in enough states to cobble together an electoral college victory.
On the first strategy, some bad news. A new Quinnipiac University survey shows that Trump's position against Clinton is essentially unchanged since the last time the school polled, in March. At that point, Clinton was up six points; now, she's up four. Why is that bad news? Because this is after Trump solidified the Republican nomination. This is after Republicans theoretically ended their intraparty feuding and settled on one guy to lead them forward toward November. And in a one-on-one contest with Clinton -- whose Democratic Party is still split -- Trump still trails.
Clinton's party isn't as divided as it used to be. If we look at her lead in RealClearPolitics' average of polls since January, you can see that the Democratic contest narrowed as Clinton's lead over Trump grew. Since early April, Clinton's lead over Bernie Sanders among Democrats has grown steadily. After the Indiana primary, the point at which Trump's opponents all left the playing field, her lead over Trump vanished -- with a bit of an uptick recently.
Polling this far out is about trends. The trend in the Democratic race, driven, perhaps, by Jerry Brown-style acceptance of her inevitability, has been toward Clinton's victory. The trend in general-election polling, post-Indiana, was toward Trump. It's too early to say whether that trend is reversing, but it doesn't appear to be continuing, which is the bad news for Trump. Especially since the Democratic nomination contest is on the verge of being finally, officially resolved -- at which point history suggests that Democratic primary voters will rally around the nominee.
Since Quinnipiac's March poll, the biggest movement has been among men -- particularly white men. In March, Trump led with men by three points; now he leads by 16. (Quinnipiac calls this "a titanic clash of the sexes.")
Quinnipiac also found that Clinton and Trump are about equally disliked, which we've seen in poll after poll. Fifty-one percent of voters have a strongly unfavorable opinion of Trump, including 83 percent of Democrats. Forty-nine percent view Clinton strongly unfavorably -- including 91 percent of Republicans. Independents view the two strongly unfavorably at margins of 53 percent and 55 percent, respectively.
So what about a third-party candidate? Quinnipiac asked about two of the most likely names that people will see on their ballots, Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein. In a four-way matchup, Johnson got 5 percent of the vote (including 10 percent of independents) and Stein 3 percent (with 7 percent of independents). As MSNBC's Steve Kornacki pointed out on Twitter, that's bad news for Johnson, who is the more viable alternative candidate but needs a consolidated 15 percent of support to make it onto the debate stage. Splitting the protest vote with Stein (or anyone else) makes that harder.
The state of the race, then, is what it has been for a while. Clinton has a narrow lead, but she appears to have perhaps stopped the bleeding against Trump. Third-party candidates don't make much of a dent. And Americans, by a 47 percent to 39 percent margin in Quinnipiac’s poll, would rather have Trump over for a back-yard barbecue than Clinton. Washington Post
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