Hillary Clinton leads Donald Trump by four points in an ABC/Washington Post national poll conducted in the days following the second presidential debate.
Clinton leads among likely voters nationwide, 50-46. When third-party candidates are included in the poll, Clinton still leads by four points, 47-43, with Libertarian Gary Johnson at 5 percent and Green Party candidate Jill Stein at 2 percent among likely voters.
Her lead has increased by two points since ABC/Washington Post conducted a poll in late September, when the former Secretary of State led 49-47.
Clinton also led by two points in the four-way poll from September, 46-44, with Johnson at 5 percent and Stein at 1 percent.
The ABC/Washington Post poll was conducted via live telephone interview among 740 likely voters, with a margin of error of plus or minus three percent.
TPM’s PollTracker Average for the general election shows Clinton leading Trump, 47.6 to 42.3.
That graph doesn’t match the headlines about Clinton maintaining or expanding the national lead. If shows the race tightening.
It’s just torture looking at this stuff. I try not to do it, but always fail. However close this looks, I’ll be surprised if Clinton doesn’t win easily. I just want everything else to assure me of that. I think we’re all in for a lot of worry until this godawful election is over.
Try pollster.com or fivethirtyeight.com or election.princeton.edu for poll graphs that are smoothed better (pollster) or weight and adjust polls better (fivethirtyeight) or try to look at the bigger picture (election.princeton.edu)
TPM’s Polltracker just jumps all over the place and tends to induce whiplash.
It also doesn’t match the Clinton number in the article, which puts Clinton at 47.6, while the graph has her at 44.7. That’s a decline of nearly 5 points since yesterday. I just don’t believe that.
TPM might as well bag it on their poll-tracking. It makes zero sense and it doesn’t even look like they are doing the math right. They had it at 8.5 points on Friday but now it’s down to 2.7 even though Clinton went UP in most of the polls release over the weekend and today – even Rassmussen?
The REAL difference is probably closer to the 8.5 TPM had on Friday, based on the polls coming out recently including NBC, ABC, GWU etc. Internet polls under-report Clinton’s support by about 3%, and ABC has been decidedly anti-Clinton this entire cycle, probably because of how they weight the potential electorate.
Fivethirtyeight.com is probably the most rigorous and analytical of the polling aggregate sites, but in trying to be “fair” they overvalue internet polling with larger sample sizes, even when they clearly may just reinforce a sampling bias (not intentionally) against minorities less likely to use the internet a lot.