Two bad weeks for Trump puts him on the defensive in Florida
WASHINGTON – In the must win state of Florida over the past three weeks it has gone from too close to call to a big lead for Democrat Hillary Clinton. The former Secretary of State now established a 6 point lead over her Republican rival Donald Trump in a new Suffolk University Poll.
In the survey, Clinton leads Trump 48%-42% in a two-way race. That’s an improvement for her from other recent Sunshine State polls averaged by RealClearPolitics, which had shown the two tied at 44%-44%.
When you look at the polls cross tabs Clinton’s Sunshine State lead does narrows to four points when Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson and Jill Stein of the Green Party are added to the ballot. In a four-way contest, Clinton is at 43% and Trump at 39%, with Johnson at 4% and Stein at 3%. When more options are mentioned, the number of undecided voters rises a tick, to 11% from 9% in the two-way race.
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.
Things look a great deal like they did at this point in the race when 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,
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.
Nationally this week’s 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.
