Poll: Hillary Clinton leads Donald Trump in national poll
Hillary Clinton now leads Donald Trump by 9 points, 46 - 37 percent, according to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC poll.
Trump’s performance in the Sunday debate helped him rally GOP voters after the disclosure Friday of a 2005 tape of Trump making crude remarks about women had brought his poll numbers down dramatically.
Eighty-nine percent of Republicans said after the debate that they would vote for Trump, compared to the 74 percent that said over the weekend that they would vote for him in a head-to-head contest with Clinton. The weekend polling also showed that 39 percent of Republicans felt that Republican congressional candidates should continue to support Trump as the party’s nominee, and that percentage went up to 45 percent after the debate. Only 6 percent of GOP voters said their party’s congressional candidates should call for him to drop out of the race over his comments about women, and 8 percentage-point drop from weekend polling.
Thirty-four percent of voters Monday thought Trump’s 2005 comments were “inappropriate but typical of how some men talk in private with other men.” Thirty-seven percent of those polled over the weekend thought the comments were inappropriate. Forty-one percent said the comments were “completely unacceptable,’’ because they described “touching women in a sexual way without their consent,” and that remained the case over the weekend and in Monday polling.
Eighty-eight percent of Democrats support Clinton, while 83 percent of Republicans say they’ll vote for Trump. White women with four-year college degrees support Clinton rather than Trump by a margin of 29 points. Trump leads Clinton among white men without four-year college degrees by 36 points.
The Journal/NBC News survey included 500 registered voters on Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 8-9, and 400 on Monday, Oct. 10. The margin of error was plus or minus 4.38 percentage points for weekend polling and 4.9 points for Monday’s sample. The margin of error for the full sample of 900 interviews is plus or minus 3.27 percentage points.