A vast poll of tens of thousands of voters in all 50 American states published by the Washington Post on Tuesday showed Hillary Clinton with leads in enough states to bring her to the doorstep of victory – despite significant challenges in places Democrats have been winning for decades.
For Donald Trump, key parts of the Republican base are under threat, the poll suggests, even as he puts pressure on Clinton in states such as Pennsylvania, where she recently enjoyed a nearly double-digit lead.
Clinton leads Trump by more than four points in 20 states plus DC, giving her a solid base of 244 electoral college votes, just short of the 270 needed to win, the poll indicates. Trump leads by more than four points in 20 states, but these add up to only 126 electoral college votes.
The Post poll, with its wealth of data, emerged as Trump broke a losing streak of 40 consecutive national surveys by major pollsters showing Clinton with a lead in the presidential race. In a CNN/Orc poll of registered voters published on Tuesday, Trump led Clinton by two points, 45-43, in a race that included the Libertarian and Green party candidates, Gary Johnson and Jill Stein. The gap was within the poll’s margin of error.
The sense that the presidential race is heating up was reinforced by the end of the long Labor Day weekend, the reopening of schools and the renewed or first-time focus by voters on the choice they will make in November. Sixty-three days remain in the presidential race. Early voting begins in dozens of states later this month.
Clinton retains a lead of between two and five points in averages of polls of the four-way race. Here’s what the past five weeks look like, in RealClearPolitics’ poll average:
Even as the contest to succeed Barack Obama seemed to tighten, however, polling analysts warned that the long view was what counted. “Most bad polling analysis stems from people’s desire to take the most recent/most hyped poll as the gospel truth, instead of averaging data,” FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver tweeted.
Based on Tuesday’s new numbers, a model maintained by FiveThirtyEight that takes into account polling data, the economy and historical data showed a slight uptick in Trump’s chances of winning the White House, from 30.4% to 32.5%.
If the race is tightening a bit, the Post survey, conducted by the online polling firm SurveyMonkey, pointed to potentially alarming weaknesses for Trump supporters in the real estate mogul’s candidacy.
With scant indication that Trump has expanded on 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney’s appeal among nonwhite voters, Trump’s most likely path to victory entails exceptionally strong support among white voters, whom Romney won 59-39 over Obama.
Trump, however, is losing to Clinton in a majority of states among white voters with a college degree, according to the Post/SurveyMonkey poll, which was conducted online from 9 August to 1 September among 74,886 registered voters across the country.
In the northern battleground states of Michigan and Wisconsin, meanwhile, the Post poll reinforces the notion advanced by a number of parallel polls that Clinton may face an unexpected challenge. Both states have voted for a Democrat for president in each of the past six cycles.
But both states have a high majority of white voters combined with pockets of economic stagnation and a Republican party apparatus, especially in Scott Walker’s Wisconsin, that could conceivably produce a Trump surprise.
The Post poll has Clinton up by only two points in each case, compared with average Clinton leads of four to five points in Wisconsin and seven points in Michigan. The poll found Clinton ahead by only four points in Pennsylvania, where in August she averaged a nine-point lead.
The Post poll indicates, as other polls have, that Trump may fail to make good on his vow to win his home state of New York. Clinton is up by 22 points there, according to the Post; she leads in neighboring Connecticut by 12 points.
