On Friday we saw some numbers out of Reuters which looked very bad for Donald Trump as his standing in that survey dipped to a 14 point deficit. At the time I saw some significant pushback from Trump supporters in the comments and around social media airing complaints over the sample size and demographic breakdown. Fair enough. Polling remains an inexact science and any single set of diverging numbers can always be an outlier. But now, only two days later, the ABC News poll is showing, if anything, even worse signs on the horizon for the Trump campaign. Clinton is ringing up her first actual majority in the results and Trump is down by… a lot.
Hillary Clinton surged to a broad advantage against Donald Trump in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, capitalizing on Trump’s recent campaign missteps. Two-thirds of Americans see him as biased against groups such as women, minorities or Muslims, and a new high, 64 percent, call Trump unqualified to serve as president.
These and other doubts about Trump have produced a sharp 14-point swing in preferences among registered voters, from +2 points for Trump in mid-May, after he clinched the GOP nomination, to +12 points for Clinton now, 51-39 percent. That snaps the race essentially back to where it was in March.
Putting Hillary over the 50% mark will be a big deal for her campaign to tout on the media trail, and a twelve point deficit is a rather glum number to saddle Trump with. And despite the sampling used (which we’ll get to in a minute) this is the same poll that had Trump up by 2 a month ago. Still, the methodology matters and this one will be open to some of the same questions. You can view the full results and cross tabs here and there are obvious questions.
The survey was conducted June 20-23 and we’re going to see some of the same issues raised about this poll as with the Reuters one. The sample size is fine, at roughly 1,000 respondents, but the demographics are rather dubious. They included 36-24-33 Democrats, Republicans and independents for the full sample and 37-27-30 DRI among registered voters. Even granting the Democrats a built-in party advantage for the general election, that’s a pretty wide spread in Clinton’s favor.
You can also draw comparisons between the ABC survey and the new Wall Street Journal / NBC poll which came out at the same time.
The survey of 1,000 registered voters showed Mrs. Clinton leading 46% to 41% in a head-to-head matchup. Mrs. Clinton’s number held steady over the past month, while Mr. Trump’s standing dropped by 2 points since May. The survey was conducted June 19-23, a period of tumult within his campaign.
This one has a far more balanced spread in terms of the sample rates, was held during the same time period and used the same number of respondents. (The WSJ poll reflects a roughly D+4 spread while ABC’s is up around a dozen.) Trump still won’t be throwing any parties over it since he’s down by five and Clinton has actually gained two points, but it’s still essentially within the margin of error, showing a very tight race. And people are noticing the disparity of of the party split between the two polls.
One difference b/w the NBC/WSJ and ABC/WaPo polls?
NBC/WSJ has party ID at D+4 advantage.
ABC/WaPo has party ID at D+12
— Mark Murray (@mmurraypolitics) June 26, 2016
Pick your own poison. For Trump, the news is either very bad or only slightly worse than it was a month ago. Either way, he’s not seeing much of a bounce from the events of the past few weeks, but then again we haven’t had time for his campaign staff shakeup or Brexit to really bake into the cake yet either. And as with all such things, keep in mind that it’s still a week before the 4th of July. There’s a political eternity left before the election so I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it just yet.
