Hillary cruises ahead of Trump with a 12-point lead in latest poll
Hillary Clinton is steaming ahead of Donald Trump in the polls, nailing a 12 percentage point lead among likely voters according to a Reuters/Ipsos survey.
The poll shows Hillary at her strongest so far this month, capturing 45 percent of voters against Trump's 33 percent, the figures showed on Tuesday.
The survey, which was conducted between August 18 and 22, shows the Democrat nominee gaining traction against her arch rival as the November 8 election nears.
And a separate Reuters/Ipsos project showed that if the election were held today, Clinton would have a 95 percent chance of beating Trump, with wins in the key swing states of Florida, Ohio and Virginia.
Trump has trailed the former First Lady throughout most of the 2016 campaign.
But her latest lead represents a stronger level of support than previously: Earlier in August, Clinton's lead over Trump ranged from 3 to 9 percentage points.
Analysis shows that Clinton can currently bank on at least 268 votes in the Electoral College, the body that ultimately chooses the next president, according to a Reuters/Ipsos States of the Nation project.
A candidate needs 270 votes to win the White House.
Trump, by contrast, would capture just 179 electoral votes. Based on current voter preferences he would win at least 21 states to Hillary's 19 - but most of his states are smaller, lesser-populated ones that do not count for as many Electoral College votes as Clinton's.
It appears that Trump's best chance is to turn out Republican voters in huge numbers and hope that a lot of Democrats stay home.
However, Republicans appear to have turned out as strongly as Democrats only once in presidential elections since at least 1976.
That was in 2004, when the electorate was made up of 37 percent of Republicans, 37 percent of Democrats and 26 percent of Independents, according to exit poll data collected by the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell University.
'There's still a lot of this demolition derby of an election to go,' said Donald Green, a political scientist at Columbia University.
'A lot of people who support Trump don't have a very good record of voter turnout, and who knows if they show up this time.'
Another factor is that despite Clinton's lead, the first, separate Reuters/Ipsos poll found that about 22 percent of likely voters would not pick either candidate.
That lack of support is high compared with how people responded to the poll during the 2012 presidential election between Democratic President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney.
'Those who are wavering right now are just as likely to be thinking about supporting a third-party candidate instead, and not between Clinton and Trump,' said Tom Smith, who directs the Center for the Study of Politics and Society at the University of Chicago.
During the latest polling, Clinton faced renewed scrutiny about her handling of classified emails while serving as secretary of state from 2009 to 2013, while Trump's campaign chief Paul Manafort resigned after a reshuffle of the candidate's campaign leadership team.
Clinton held a smaller lead in a separate four-way poll that included Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson and Jill Stein of the Green Party.
Among likely voters, 41 percent supported Clinton, while 33 percent backed Trump. Johnson was backed by 7 percent and Stein by 2 percent.
The Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted online in English in all 50 states. Both presidential polls included 1,115 respondents and had a credibility interval - a measure of accuracy - of 3 percentage points.
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