Five new polls came out on Thursday from four critical battleground states: Florida, Ohio, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. (North Carolina was polled twice.) Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania were all polled by the same outfit a month ago, during the peak of Hillary Clinton’s recent national poll numbers. By comparing the new polls in those states with the old ones, we can get a sense for what changed — and what trends may be underlying the numbers.
Sadly, though, doing so doesn’t offer us much insight.
The polls are from Quinnipiac University, covering early August and early September. So what’s changed? In Florida, things stayed mostly the same overall, though Republicans and Democrats both moved a bit to Clinton. In Ohio and Pennsylvania, Trump gained 5 points against Clinton, bringing him into a tie with her in the Buckeye State. Trump saw big gains with nonwhite voters in Pennsylvania and with white women; white men in Florida and Ohio moved toward Trump, but white women didn’t.
Especially since we’re talking about changes of 6 to 10 percentage points in demographic groups with margins of error that approach those figures, it’s at best murky.
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