2016 Presidential Polls: Clinton Tops 6 Of 9 New Polls With 4 Days To Go Before Election Day

With just four days left in the 2016 presidential campaign, a barrage of nine new polls were released on Thursday and Friday — with six of them showing Democrat Hillary Clinton holding a lead over her Republican foe Donald Trump. One of the new polls showed the national race tied between Clinton and Trump, while two more — both of them polls that have been more favorable to Trump throughout the campaign — show Trump either leading the race or in a tie.

Rasmussen Reports is rated by data journalism site FiveThirtyEight as displaying a two-point bias toward Republican candidates — the fourth-highest Republican “house effect” of any national polling firm.

Rasmusenn’s poll released on Thursday shows Trump with a significant three-point lead nationwide in a four-way race that also includes Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein.

But a Rasmussen poll released on Friday showed the race tied at 44 percent each. That makes three of the last four days that the Rasmussen daily “White House Watch” poll has seen the race as even.

At the same time, the daily Los Angeles Times/USC/Dornslife tracking poll has shown Trump leading almost every day since September 10 — and on Thursday showed Trump pulling away from Clinton with a five-point lead. By Friday, Trump’s lead in what has been perhaps the most friendly poll to him throughout the campaign had slipped a point, to four, 47-43.

The single tied poll on Thursday was issued by Investor’s Business Daily and the polling firm TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence (TIPP). The same firm released the Friday version of their poll as well, still showing a tied race.

But Clinton showed a distinct advantage in the other six polls to hit the streets on Thursday and Friday.

MCCLATCHY/MARIST: The McClatchy News Service poll conducted by Marist College showed Clinton clinging to a one-point lead on Friday, 44-43. But the poll contained some worrying news for Clinton as well. According to the survey, 51 percent of voters believe that, at some point, Clinton has “sone something illegal.”

Only 26 percent believe that Trump has broken the law at some point.

FOX NEWS: The conservative-leaning news network also released its own new poll on Friday — and the survey places Clinton two points on top of Trump. Interestingly, Fox News uses three different polling firms to conduct its polls. The poll released Friday was conducted jointly by Anderson Robbins Research, a Democratic pollster, and Republican polling firm Shaw & Company Research.

According to the FiveThirtyEight.com pollster ratings, the combination of those two pollsters has historically produced a slight “lean” toward Democrats of four-10ths of a percentage point.

NEW ORLEANS TIMES-PICAYUNE: A daily tracking poll — meaning, a poll that surveys voters every day, taking an average of the previous several days’ results — issued by the New Orleans Times-Picayune together with research firm Lucid showed a five-point lead for Clinton in the poll’s three-day rolling average.

Clinton scored 44 percent of support measured by the poll to 39 percent for Trump. The poll also showed, as many polls have in this election cycle, a large share of “undecided” voters — nine percent, enough to swing the election either way.

According to a study by the polling firm Survey Monkey, conducted in August, this year’s undecided voters display “a slightly more Republican than Democratic tilt,” which could prove to be an advantage for Trump.

CBS/NEW YORK TIMES: In a poll taken by CBS News and the New York Times from October 28 to November 1 and released on Thursday, Clinton hung on with a three-point lead over Trump — but that lead is down from nine points on October 19.

In the Thursday CBS/NYT poll, Clinton garnered 45 percent support, down from 47 on October 19, while Trump showed a surge from 38 percent two weeks ago to 42 now. While the poll showed only 3 percent undecided voters, Johnson took 5 percent and Stein 4.

2016 General Election: Trump vs. Clinton – Polls – HuffPost Pollster https://t.co/vg6VwwbAX8

— Maureen Cadigan (@mecadigan) November 4, 2016

ABC News/Washington Post: In another daily tracking poll, ABC News and the Washington Post see a two-point lead for Clinton, 47 to 45 percentage points.

Unlike the CBS/NYT poll, however, the ABC/WaPo poll showed a slight upward trend for Clinton who was last at 47 percent on October 27 in the tracking poll, which bases its findings on a four-day ruling average of its respondents’ answers. On October 30, Trump led in the same poll by one point, 46 to 45.

That upward trend for Clinton continued in the Friday release of the ABC/WaPo tracking poll, which saw Clinton’s lead over Trump expand to four points, 47-43.

REUTERS/IPSOS: In the final poll issued on November 3, also a tracking poll, the research firm Ipsos in collaboration with the news agency Reuters see a whopping eight-point lead for Clinton in the four-way presidential race. In that survey Clinton won 45 percent of the prospective vote, to 37 percent for Trump, with Johnson taking 5 percent and Stein just 2.

On Friday in the daily Reuters/Ipsos poll, Clinton still held a commanding lead, though she’d lost a single point and now was beating Trump by seven, 44-37 — again, like the other polls, including Johnson and Stein.

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On the polling “aggregators,” sites who compile averages of all polls, Clinton still holds narrow but solid leads overall. FiveThirtyEight shows the Democrat leading by three points, 45 to 42, while Huffington Post Pollster.com sees a wider lead in the polling average of 45.5 to 40.8, a gap pf 5.7 points. Real Clear Politics sees the race more tightly, on the other hand, with a 45-43 two-point Clinton lead.

[Featured Image By Ross D. Franklin/AP Images]