As the negative news continues to swirl around Donald Trump,
this week’s polling is very similar to last week’s.
In the two-way polling, Trump trails by 7.0%, 48.8% to 41.8%,
compared to last week’s 48.3% to 42.5%. The four-way polling has Trump losing
even more ground, trailing by 7.1 points. Clinton has 46% to Trump’s 38.9 %, a
two point gain for Clinton, compared to last week’s 44.8% to 39.7%. These are
very solid leads, confirmed by almost all of the polling available.
The interesting questions building off of our last post are
these: Is this Trump’s ceiling and what will happen with undecided voters? Is partisanship
going to lead them back to Trump? Are they going to vote at all or are they
going to vote for a third party? Third party or undecided voters currently
account for between 9% and 15% of voters. We are clearly past the point where
there are enough of these voters to turn the tide, as Clinton seems likely to
win on the amount of support she has now.
If Trump only gets 41.8% of the votes, his current number,
that is going to be hard on Republicans down ballot. His percentage might grow
slightly as undecideds decide not to participate, leaving his decided voters as
a slightly bigger pool of all voters. This would also increase his deficit as
the larger number of Clinton voters would gain by more.
Trump’s percentage of the vote is now getting closer to the
percentage of voters who view him favorably. He has a 34.5% favorable rating,
according to the RCP average, so he is still getting some voters who don’t like
him but not many. This all means that the undecided pool does not include many
people who like him.
Clinton’s favorable score is also moving up with her overall
polling. She is viewed favorably by 43.2% of those polled, and is actually
doing a touch worse than Trump at adding unfavorable voters to her total.
Roughly 20% of the voters have an unfavorable opinion of
both candidates. But Clinton has about an 8% higher favorable rating than
Trump. That means Trump would need to get 70% of voters who dislike both
candidates to vote for him to overcome his deficit. Since these voters have the
option of either not voting or voting for third parties that becomes very
difficult to pull off. Trump needs to drive down Hillary’s favorables at a time
he is having a hard time making any real news beyond the chaos.
With three weeks to go, what happens with the
undecided/third party vote will determine how many states Clinton will win and
help decide the down ballot races. This is what we are watching.
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