On Friday, I wrote that there was good reason to think the Donald Trump’s surge in the polls around the time of Hillary Clinton’s ‘deplorables’ story and her health scare would prove ephemeral. I think we’re already starting to see some evidence that that’s happening.
Take Florida.
But before we take Florida, let’s recall the timeline. Clinton’s ‘deplorables’ speech was on Friday the 9th. But it only really broke out as a story the next day on the 10th. Her health scare came the next day on Sunday the 11th. Now back to Florida.
We have four premium phone polls from Florida so far this month (for apples to apples comparisons I’m using the four way match up in each case).
Quinnipiac 8/29 – 9/7 (entirely before Clinton’s bad weekend): tied at 43%
CNN/ORC 9/7 – 9/12 (most in the mix of the bad weeked): Trump +3
Siena/NYT 9/10 – 9/14 (partly during the bad weekend, partly aftermath: Clinton +1
Monmouth 9/16 – 9/19 (entirely after Clinton’s reappearance): Clinton +5
These are of course different pollsters with different methodologies and house effects. So the conclusions we can draw are limited. But the most straightforward explanation is a surge of Trump numbers which likely bounced back or at a minimum is not continuing.
A counter to this argument is something I’ve seen others say today, which is that when you compare today’s Monmouth poll to their last poll of the state she went from +9 to +5, which is hardly a good trend. But their last poll was taken from August 12-15 – coming off the height of the Khan firestorm. So it doesn’t surprise me she’s no longer at that high. Some of this may simply be a question of what time interval we’re looking at.
I noted over the weekend that the first post-deplorables premium phone poll of Pennsylvania showed her with a 9 point lead in contrast to the PollTracker Average of of Clinton +4.3 prior to the poll’s release. Again, that’s only a single poll. But it’s a premium in-state poll – strong reputation. And if there had been a true shift in the race in Trump’s direction we’d expect that to show up in Pennsylvania even if Clinton remained in the lead. We would not expect it to show her at twice her existing average. That poll was taken from the 9th through the 16th. So about half in the delorables era, half after.
We have very little national poll data to go on so far. But what little information we have tends to confirm that Trump has not been able to break out of the sub-1 percentage point leads he’s had twice before. From an under 1 percentage point lead on Friday, Clinton has moved back into a 4.1 lead in the PollTracker Average.
Having said all this, let me be clear what I’m not saying.
I’m not saying that Clinton is back in a comfortable lead. I’m not saying we know she’ll win. I’m not saying that we know that the virtual tie Trump moved into last week has subsided. I’m making a much narrower point. We don’t have enough data yet to know. But the limited data we do have both nationally and in key states suggests Clinton is reopening the modest lead she had prior to her weekend of horribles. And it looks to me at least like what I called the ‘Clinton Wall’ has not been breached.
We’ll have to wait for more data.
