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Presidential Polls 2016: Trump Vs. Clinton Enters Home Stretch With Democrat Holding Solid Lead

By Jonathan Vankin
Published on: 07:18 PST, Oct 23, 2016

With just 16 days to go before the November 8, 2016, Presidential election, the polls continue to show what they have shown for the past several weeks. Democrat Hillary Clinton is racing toward the finish line with a significant lead over Republican Donald Trump, with some polls putting Clinton at a double-digit advantage.

Not every poll agrees. But of 40 polls released since the first presidential debate between Trump and Clinton on September 26 and listed by the polling aggregation site Real Clear Politics, Clinton has led in 33 of them while Trump has shown a lead in only six, with one poll seeing the race as a tie.

Those polls also include the two leading “third party” candidates, Jill Stein of the Green Party and Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson. In the 37 polls released since September 26 pitting Clinton against Trump one-on-one, the Democrat has led in 29, Trump in four, with four polls tied.

But in the “four way race” polls, which as of October 22 showed Johnson averaging 6.6 percent of the vote and Stein 2.2 percent, four of the six polls that placed Trump with a lead ranging from one point to just three. But four of them came from one polling firm, Rasmussen Reports, a firm whose polls have shown a “house effect” tilting toward Republican candidates by two percentage points, according to the pollster rankings compiled by the data journalism site, FiveThirtyEight.com.

Removing Rasmussen polls from the overall polling averages, which Clinton has led steadily throughout the campaign, results in a significantly expanded lead for Clinton, according to polling expert Alan Abramowitz.

As of October 22, how does Clinton stack up against Trump in the major polling averages, even with “third party” candidates included?

In the FiveThirtyEight.com average, Clinton tops Trump by 6.6 percentage points, 45.7 to 39.1, with Johnson scoring an even six percent on average.

In the average compiled by the Huffington Post Pollster.com site, Clinton leads Trump by 6.3 percent, 44.9 to 38.6.

And in the average compiled by Real Clear Politics, Clinton outpaces the field in a four-way race, averaging 45 percent of the vote to 39.4 for Trump. In over words, Real Clear Politics sees the race as somewhat tighter than the other two major poll aggregators but still has Clinton firmly ahead by 5.6 percentage points.

By contrast, in the 2012 election, the Real Clear Politics final average showed Democrat Barack Obama, the incumbent president, barely nipping Republican challenger Mitt Romney by just 0.7 percentage points. The final results of the election were more comfortable for Obama as he beat Romney by 3.9 points.

The various polling “models,” which assign percentage-based odds to the outcome of the election, also see Clinton as an overwhelming favorite heading into the final two weeks of what has sometimes seemed to be a campaign that has gone on forever.

The FiveThirtyEight.com odds, based on polling data only, give Clinton an 87.4 percent chance of victory on November 8. But the New York Times “Upshot” projection model assigns Clinton an even more generous probability of beating Trump of 93 percent.

“A victory by Mr. Trump remains possible,” Times polling analyst Josh Katz wrote on Sunday. “Mrs. Clinton’s chance of losing is about the same as the probability that an N.F.L. kicker misses a 30-yard field goal.”

At the same time, the Princeton Election Consortium, the longest-running of the election outcome probability models, which has been in existence since 2004, is even more positive about Clinton. The PEC model as of Sunday assigned Clinton an overwhelming 97 percent chance of winning the White House based on a “random drift” statistical model. Using a “Bayesian” model, a different type of statistical calculation, Clinton has an astonishing 99 percent chance of becoming the next president in the voting results on November 8, making her election a virtual certainty.

[Featured Image By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images]

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