Election Update: Trump’s Slump Deepens In The Polls
There’s no longer any doubt that the party conventions have shifted the presidential election substantially toward Hillary Clinton. She received a larger bounce from her convention than Donald Trump got from his, but Trump has continued to poll so poorly in state and national surveys over the past two days that his problems may be getting worse.
The recent Fox News, Marist College and NBC News/Wall Street Journal national polls show Trump trailing Clinton by 9 to 14 percentage points, margins that would make for the largest general election blowout since 1984 if they held. Clinton’s numbers in those polls are on the high end of what we’ve seen lately — Marist, for instance, has generally had a Clinton-leaning house effect in its polls this year. By contrast, a series of polls released earlier in the week generally put Clinton’s advantage at 5 to 8 percentage points.
The new polls are noteworthy, however, because they postdate the earlier surveys — Marist’s poll was conducted Monday through Wednesday, for instance. That opens up the possibility that the spiral of negative stories for Trump, such as his criticism of the family of a Muslim-American soldier killed in action and his renewed feud with GOP leadership, are deepening his problems above and beyond Clinton’s convention bounce. Not only have Clinton’s numbers risen since the Democratic National Convention, but Trump’s numbers have fallen back into the mid- to high 30s in polls that include third-party candidates. And Trump’s favorability ratings, following modest improvement after his convention, are now about as bad as they’ve ever been.
Meanwhile, polls of Michigan, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire — three swing states with demographics that, in theory, could be friendly to Trump — showed Clinton with leads of 9 percentage points, 11 points and 15 points, respectively. Those are big leads for Clinton, but they shouldn’t be all that surprising: The margins look a lot like the ones by which Barack Obama defeated John McCain in those states in 2008, an election he won by 7.3 percentage points overall. According to our now-cast, Clinton would defeat Trump by a similar margin nationally, 7.9 percentage points, in a hypothetical election held today. Compared with that new, higher baseline for Clinton, a Suffolk poll showing her “only” 4 points ahead of Trump in Florida, which would have looked like an excellent result for her a week ago, is middling.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-trumps-slump-deepens-in-polls/
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