Trump Collapsing? Not So Fast. New Reuters Poll Has Him Within Three
Although other polls in recent days show Hillary jumping to large lead, Reuters latest shows her dropping five points since Monday.
Presidential polling this year is like Texas weather. Wait 15 minutes and it’s likely to change.
Yesterday, a McClatchy/Marist poll had Hillary Clinton jumping to a 15-point lead against Donald Trump. A Fox News poll had the Democratic candidate up by 10.
That was yesterday. A new Reuters/Ipsos poll out Friday afternoon indicates Clinton’s lead over Trump has narrowed to less than three points among likely voters, 42% to 39%. This is within the margin of error, suggesting, says Reuters “the race is roughly even.” It also marks a five-point drop for Clinton since Monday.
The Trump staffers who CNBC claimed earlier this week were “suicidal” over the campaign’s sudden collapse can take at least a couple steps back from the edge.
Reuters says “the reasons behind the shift were unclear.” However, in recent days Hillary Clinton was awarded “four Pinocchios” by the Washington Post for her increasingly-reported lie over how FBI Director James Comey characterized her public statements about her private email server. There was also the news of the Obama administration, of which she had been a part, sending $400 million to Iran in the dead of night as an apparent ransom for four American prisoners.
Though the Reuters numbers — and an LA Times/USC poll that shows the race a statistical tie — come as a relief to the Trump campaign, the news is not all sunny. As Robert Eno at Conservative Review noted Friday, Trump is down 6.8 points in the RealClear Politics average (though it does not include the new Reuters poll.) Eno also indicates how the GOP nominee is even running weak in states that have been solidly Republican since the 1980s. For example, Trump is down four in Georgia head-to-head with Hillary, and down six in Florida.
By way of comparison, Eno says that on this date in 2012 Barack Obama had a 2.8 percent lead in the RealClear Politics average over Mitt Romney.
On the other hand, on July 28th, a mere eight days ago, Donald Trump was beating Hillary Clinton in the RCP average. Meaning, applauding or getting agitated over the polls at this point is pointless. We’re better off popping the popcorn, putting up our feet and cheering TeamUSA because this particular race is far from finished.
