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New 2016 Presidential Polls: Clinton’s Lead On Trump Holding Firm In Latest Polling Numbers

By Jonathan Vankin
Published on: 16:00 PST, Oct 27, 2016

A new set of polls in the 2016 presidential election, released on Thursday, show that Democrat Hillary Clinton continues to hold a solid lead over her Republican foe, the New York businessman and former reality TV star Donald Trump.

A number of polling analysts suggested this week that the race may have been “tightening” between Trump and Clinton, after the Democrat blew open a wide gap starting with the first presidential debate on September 26, and only solidifying after each of the subsequent two debates.

For example, a Monmouth University poll on Wednesday showed Clinton with a four-point lead over Trump, a sharp drop from the most recent previous Monmouth poll taken in late September, which showed Clinton in cruise control with a nine-point advantage.

In the FiveThirtyEight.com election model, which uses polls and various other factors to assign each candidate a win-probability, Clinton’s chance of victory shrunk to 82.2 percent on Thursday — down from a high of 87.4 percent on October 18. Other models still showed Clinton with an even higher probability of victory on November 8.

But Thursday’s flurry of polls would seem to alleviate any fears that Clinton and her supporters might have been harboring over the past week.

The respected Pew Research Center released a new poll of registered voters taken between October 20 and 25 — and that survey showed Clinton with a comfortable six-point lead, 46 percent to 40, with Libertarian Gary Johnson polling at 6 percent and Green Party hopeful Jill Stein stalled at 3 percent.

Johnson’s share has nearly halved since June, according to Pew, when the Libertarian was pulling a relatively impressive 11 percent. Stein’s high came in an August Pew survey, when the Green Party nominee topped out at 5 percent.

Among Latino voters, Pew found Clinton crushing Trump, 65 to 18.

An ABC News tracking poll — that is, a poll that takes a five-day rolling average to snap a daily picture of the race — shows Clinton’s lead on October 25 down from the previous day. But she still held strong at 48 percent, to 42 for Trump.

That represented a relatively insignificant one point day-to-day drop for Clinton, with a two-point pickup for Trump.

Also on Thursday, YouGov, in collaboration with The Economist magazine, released a new poll showing Clinton with a five-point lead among “likely” voters and a four-point lead among registered voters.

With the likely voters, Clinton leads Trump 46 to 41. When the broader category of registered voters were surveyed, Clinton’s share dropped by a point while Trump’s remained the same in the YouGov/Economist poll.

In one of the few polls showing only a narrow lead for Clinton, the Democrat held a one-point edge in a survey taken by the research firm Gravis and the conservative political site Breitbart News. But given that Breitbart is operated by Steve Bannon, who is also the CEO of Trump’s campaign (note that Bannon says he is “on leave” from Breitbart during the campaign), for Clinton to hold even a slight lead in that poll could be seen as significant.

The pollster rankings compiled by FiveThirtyEight.com give Gravis a “B minus” rating, and note that the firm shows a 1.1 point “house effect” in favor of Republican candidates, meaning Clinton’s lead is likely wider than the one percentage point indicated in the Gravis/Breitbart poll.

The polling averages compiled by the various election-projection sites also show Clinton maintaining her solid lead.

The Huffington Post-Pollster.com average of all national polls, which include Clinton, Trump, Johnson, and Stein, places Clinton ahead by 6.2 points, 45.9 to 39.4, while the FiveThirtyEight.com average shows Clinton with a similar lead of 5.8 points over Trump, 45.7 to 39.9.

The Real Clear Politics site remains the stingiest for Clinton, but still gives the Democrat a 5.4 point lead, with 45.8 percent of the vote in the site’s national polling average. Trump collects 40.4 percent, while Johnson polls at 5.3 and Stein at 1.9.

For the sake of comparison, when the final results of the 2012 presidential election came in, incumbent president Barack Obama, the Democrat, beat his Republican challenger — former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney — by just under four points, 51.1 to 47.2.

[Featured Image By Andrew Harnik/Associated Press]

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