New polls show Hillary Clinton expanding her lead over Donald Trump. Trump could be a problem for Republican Senate candidates facing close races. And President Obama got a convention bounce in his approval rating. This is HuffPollster for Friday, August 5, 2016.
TRUMP IS DOWN BY AN AVERAGE OF 7.5 POINTS NATIONALLY - HuffPollster: “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….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….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.” [HuffPost]
Polls show Clinton ahead among traditionally Republican constituencies - Ed Kilgore: “A week after the end of convention season for both parties, it’s clear Hillary Clinton has regained the lead in a variety of national and battleground-state polls...Most of these polls show what you would expect in a post-convention ‘bounce’: a stronger consolidation of Democratic voters behind Clinton, an improvement in her favorability ratings, and better performance among independents. There are a few startling findings, however. The Fox News poll shows Clinton leading by eight points among voters over the age of 55, and 11 points among voters over 65. If this is even vaguely accurate, it would indicate a backlash against Trump from change-averse older voters who have been pretty strongly trending Republican in recent years. Similarly, the CNN poll shows Clinton up 53-40 among white college graduates, a demographic group that Mitt Romney won easily in 2012.” [NYMagazine]
Why Clinton’s lead could last - Sean Trende: “The bottom line is that Clinton is up in the polls now. Will it last? Second convention bounces tend to fade; it did for the Republicans in 2004 and 2008 (even before the Lehman Brothers collapse); it did for the Democrats in 1996. Overall, since 1968 the in-party has tended to run behind its showing even two weeks out from the convention, but this is not a hard, fast rule. In this regard, Clinton’s lead of about four-to-five points should probably make Democrats nervous. But this is where we move into the Trump-centric view of the race…. [I]t does feel like the wheels are coming off of the Trump train….In the end, we do have to remember that it is only August, that the ‘fundamentals’ of elections – the economy, presidential job approval, incumbency, and so forth – do not give Democrats much, if any, advantage, and that there are plenty of events that could derail either campaign.” [RealClearPolitics]
TRUMP MIGHT DRAG GOP SENATE CANDIDATES DOWN WITH HIM - Harry Enten: “Republicans in most Senate battlegrounds are running ahead of Trump in their states. That may last, increasing the chances that the GOP hangs on to their Senate majority. But it’s also possible that Trump begins to drag down his party’s down-ballot candidates…. Of the 34 Senate seats up for grabs in 2016, here are the 10 that are closest to changing parties, according to the current polling averages: Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin...In all but one of these 10 states, Trump is clearly running behind the Republican candidate for Senate. The only state where Trump isn’t doing at least 3 percentage points worse than his party’s Senate candidate is Wisconsin, where he is still running behind Sen. Ron Johnson at this time. On average, Trump is running nearly 7 percentage points behind the Republican candidates for Senate.” [538]
OBAMA’S APPROVAL RATING BOUNCES - Jennifer Agiesta: “President Barack Obama’s approval rating got its own convention bump, and now stands at its highest level since just before his second inauguration in 2013. Obama’s approval rating dipped to 50% after the Republican convention, but has risen to 54% in the wake of his party’s convention, with 45% disapproval,according to a new CNN/ORC Poll. That’s the most positive approval rating of his second term. The increase in Obama’s approval rating comes mostly among younger Americans ― he’s up 9 points among those under age 45 while losing a point among those age 45 or older ― and political independents and moderates ― up 9 points among each group.” [CNN]
Obama’s approval rating has held steady around 50 percent since May in the HuffPost Pollster chart, which includes most publicly available polling on the topic. The brief dip after the Republican convention recorded by CNN didn’t show up in enough polls to appear in the average.
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FRIDAY’S ‘OUTLIERS’ - Links to the best of news at the intersection of polling, politics and political data:
-Aaron Blake highlights four of this week’s worst poll numbers for Donald Trump. [WashPost]
-A new Atlanta Journal-Constitution survey gives Hillary Clinton a small edge in Georgia. [AJC]
-Political forecaster Larry Sabato moves Colorado’s presidential and Senate races further into the Democratic column. [Center For Politics]
-Nate Cohn analyzes whether Trump’s decline in the polls is likely to stick. [NYT]
-A Trump campaign memo shows how they targeted infrequent voters. [538]
-Third-party candidates Gary Johnson and Jill Stein remain largely unknown. [Gallup]
-Josh Katz questions whether Johnson could have enough impact to swing the election. [NYT]
-A new HuffPost/YouGov poll delves into the terms people use to describe their relationship. [HuffPost]