Poll: Hillary Clinton trounces Donald Trump in Pennsylvania
Hillary Clinton is dominating rival Donald Trump in the critical battleground state of Pennsylvania, according to a new poll out Thursday.
A Bloomberg Politics poll found Clinton up by nine points in the state, with Trump losing favor among a large swath of the population after a lewd 2005 tape resurfaced last week where the real estate magnate can be heard boasting about his aggressive sexual advances towards women. Statewide, likely voters backed Clinton at 51 percent and Trump at 42 percent.
When third-party candidates are taken into consideration, Clinton still handily beats Trump with the same nine-point margin: Forty-eight percent to 39 percent. Libertarian party nominee Gary Johnson garners 6 percent of the vote, while the Green party’s Jill Stein gets 4 percent.
While Clinton’s edge in Pennsylvania’s urban areas was well-known, the Democratic presidential nominee is also gaining traction in the state’s suburban regions. In four suburban counties that have been historically Republican (Buck, Montgomery, Chester, and Delaware), Bloomberg found that Clinton now has a 28-point advantage over her GOP rival.
Around the state, Trump’s 2005 “Access Hollywood” recordings are causing a negative shift in voters’s views of the Republican nominee. Sixty percent of likely voters said they were bothered a lot by the tapes, with 24 percent of his own supporters saying that. Sixty-nine percent of women said they were bothered a lot, versus 51 percent of men. Trump has since apologized for his crude language in the tapes, dismissing it as “locker room talk.” The survey, however, was conducted before the latest flood of sexual assault allegations that accuse Trump of inappropriately touching women without their consent.
Bloomberg’s poll, conducted by Selzer & Company, surveyed 806 likely voters in Pennsylvania, with 373 likely voters surveyed in Bucks, Montgomery, Chester, and Delaware counties. It was conducted from Oct. 7 to 11. The margin of error was 3.5 percentage points statewide and 5.1 percentage points for suburban counties.