Polls favor Clinton
A national poll released today from Politico/Morning Consult has Hillary Clinton surging ahead. Taken between Sept. 30 and Oct. 2, among likely voters the poll found her to be leading Trump by 6 points. Analysts say Trump fared poorly in the Sept. 26 presidential debate and the poll appears to confirm it; the last poll taken by Politico/Morning Consult before the debate had Trump up by a point.
In the poll released this morning, 42 percent of respondents said they would vote for Clinton, 36 percent for Trump, 9 percent for Libertarian Gary Johnson and 3 percent for Green Party candidate Jill Stein. This poll is not the only one showing Trump’s stock has fallen dramatically since his debate performance.
A Rasumussen Reports national poll released today has Clinton up 3 points while a CNN/ORC poll has her up by 5. The last poll to come out on Monday, this one from CBS, also has her up 5 points and a Fox News poll released Friday likewise shows Clinton with a 5 point lead.
But Trump continues to lead by 5 in the LA Times/USC tracking poll. That poll has virtually identical results, a 4 or 5 point lead for Trump each day; however, it is likely less informative because each day the interviews are conducted on the same collection of 3,000 respondents.
Battleground states
Clinton’s numbers have improved in all battleground states since squaring off on TV with the self-proclaimed billionaire. A Quinnipiac poll of Florida released today has Clinton up by 5 points and the Real Clear Politics polling average in Florida has her up by 2.5 points. Quinnipiac has her climbing into a strong 4 point lead in Pennsylvania but has Trump maintaining a healthy 4 point lead in Ohio.
A poll from Monmouth has a shocking result: Clinton up by 11 points in the battleground state of Colorado, where prior to the debate Trump had been closing in on her. A poll from Christopher Newton University in Virginia has the Republican Trump trailing Clinton by 7 points in that state.
The RCP polling averages have her up by 6 in New Hampshire and 5 points in each of Iowa, Michigan and Wisconsin. Clinton had been trailing in Nevada and North Carolina but RCP polling averages now have her with slight leads in both states.
Trump has 5 weeks and 2 debates to recover but needs the fallout from his tough week to go away. In that week he lost the first debate, directed nasty early morning tweets at Alicia Machado, a former beauty pageant winner, and saw the New York Times reveal he may not have paid federal income tax for 20 years.
Despite the time left Trump may need a game-changer to get back into the race. The polling forecast website FiveThirtyEight now has Clinton with a 70.2 percent chance of winning the White House and Trump with a 29.1 percent chance. One thing that may give Trump a boost is a threat by Wikileaks to release more purloined Clinton emails.
The first and only vice-presidential candidate debate goes tomorrow, Tuesday, in Farmville, Virginia, with the final two presidential debates scheduled for Oct. 9 (St. Louis) and Oct. 19 (Las Vegas).
