Donald Trump Just Had Another Very Bad Polling Day

Two new surveys show him with less than 40 percent of the vote against Hillary Clinton.
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Fresh off of a post-convention bounce, Hillary Clinton is continuing to grow her lead over Donald Trump, according to new national polling released Thursday evening.

Clinton leads Trump by 9 points, 47 percent to 38 percent, in a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey. While both candidates remain unpopular, the survey finds, Clinton’s image has improved “modestly.” A majority of voters say they have more trust in her to handle a crisis and to deal with foreign policy.

A McClatchy-Marist poll gives Clinton an even wider 15-point lead against Trump, 48 percent to 33 percent. The survey finds Trump ceding ground among traditionally GOP demographics, losing men to Clinton by 8 points and holding just a 2-point edge among white voters.

Among other groups, he fares far more poorly. The NBC/WSJ and McClatchy-Marist surveys give Trump just 1 percent and 2 percent of the vote, respectively, among African-American voters.

“This is coming off the Democratic convention, where a bounce [for Clinton] is expected,” Marist polling director Lee Miringoff told McClatchy about Trump’s prospects. “What you don’t want is to have the worst week of your campaign.”

At the state level, new polling in traditional battlegrounds also showed Clinton with a significant edge over Trump. New surveys released Thursday gave her a 15-point lead in New Hampshire, a 9-point lead in Michigan, an 11-point lead in Pennsylvania and a 6-point lead in Florida.

A Friday poll gave Clinton a 4-point edge in Georgia, although other recent surveys of the state show her tied with or lagging Trump. A Democrat winning the state would be a rare upset ― Georgia has gone to the GOP candidate in the past five presidential elections.

The results suggest that Trump’s problems have worsened since the end of the parties’ back-to-back conventions, thanks to a brutal news cycle dominated by party infighting and Trump’s ongoing feud with the family of a Muslim American soldier killed in Iraq.

HuffPost Pollster’s model, which aggregates publicly available polling, gives Clinton a lead of 7.5 percentage points over Trump nationally. The model also includes several recent polls with less overwhelming leads for Clinton, including online Ipsos/Reuters and UPI/CVoter tracking polls, which show her up by 4 and 6 points respectively.

In a three-way race with Gary Johnson, Clinton leads Trump 44 percent to 36 percent, according to the HuffPost Pollster model, with Johnson taking 8 percent. The surveys suggest that third-party candidates such as Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein are drawing support from both major-party candidates.

Those national margins are substantially wider than Barack Obama’s lead over Mitt Romney during any point in 2012, and, if they hold, would denote a historic win for Clinton.

But with months to go, there’s still ample time for the possibility of a narrower race, especially if Trump can manage to win over some of the Republican voters not yet in his camp.

“Do I think Trump is a damaged candidate running a terrible campaign? Absolutely. Do I think that he has zero chance to win and has effectively lost the race in August? No,” Amy Walter wrote Wednesday in the Cook Political Report. “[S]he has more options to get to 270 than he does. She is clearly the favorite. But, this race is not over.”

The NBC/WSJ poll surveyed 800 registered voters between July 31 and Aug. 3, while the McClatchy-Marist poll surveyed 983 registered voters between Aug. 1-3. Both used live interviewers to reach landlines and cell phones.

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