Poll: Hillary Clinton widens her lead over Donald Trump
Hillary Clinton has widened her lead significantly over Donald Trump since the period before the two parties held their conventions last month, according to a Monmouth University survey released Monday.
The survey found that Clinton leads Trump 46 percent to 34 percent among registered voters, with 7 percent supporting Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson and 2 percent backing Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Among likely voters, Clinton leads Trump 50 percent to 37 percent, with 7 percent supporting Johnson and 2 percent backing Stein.
A similar poll conducted by Monmouth just days before the Republican National Convention found that Clinton only had a narrow 3-percentage-point lead over Trump among registered voters and a 2-percentage-point-lead among likely voters.
The new poll found that Clinton now leads Trump 42 percent to 34 percent in 10 major swing states.
Clinton continues to maintain a strong lead among non-white voters with 69 percent of black, Asian, Hispanic and other voters of color supporting Clinton compared to only 10 percent of them who said they're for Trump. The GOP presidential nominee leads Clinton by 5 percentage points among non-Hispanic white voters -- however, Clinton leads Trump by 30 percentage points among white women with a college degree, a demographic Mitt Romney won handily in 2012.
More than 90 percent of Democrats said they will vote for Clinton, which is up from June and July, suggesting she is slowly unifying members of her party after a bitter primary battle against Bernie Sanders. The poll found 79 percent of Republicans are supporting Trump, which is virtually unchanged from the last few months.
Independent voters, meanwhile, are split between the two major candidates with 32 percent backing Trump and 30 percent backing Clinton.
Just over a quarter of voters said that Trump has the right temperament to serve as commander-in-chief and more than two-thirds said he does not. Clinton, by contrast, has the right temperament to serve as president, according to 61 percent of voters. Just over a third said she is not suited for the job.
The poll found voters are divided over whether Trump is too friendly with Russia. On the email scandal involving Clinton's use of private email servers as secretary of state, nearly two-thirds said she hasn't been honest about it, but about the same percentage said they are tired of hearing about the issue.
The poll surveyed 803 registered voters between August 4 and 7 with a 3.5 percentage point margin of error.
