Polls: Trump fans walking away
1 in 5 of his voters in survey grew less supportive in week
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump’s standing among key voter groups has steadily dropped for more than a week, erasing the lead the Republican nominee once had in the presidential contest, according to the latest findings from the USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times Daybreak national tracking poll of the race.
What’s striking about the trend is not Hillary Clinton’s rise — typically, candidates get a boost from their nominating conventions, and the Democrat’s post-convention increase of about 5 percentage points is only slightly above average.
More significant is the scope and breadth of Trump’s decline. A week like the last one, in which he has repeatedly generated controversies that have dismayed fellow Republicans, has wiped out all the gains Trump made as a result of the GOP convention.
About 1 in 5 voters in the survey grew significantly less supportive of Trump during the last week.
Roughly an equal number became more supportive of Clinton.
As of Friday, the poll showed Clinton at 45.2 percent and Trump at 44.6 percent, well within the survey’s margin of error.
Her margin could grow in coming days as the poll, which reflects a seven-day rolling average, moves away from the period in which Trump was at his peak.
The poll also asks voters which candidate they think will win. That question has often shown greater ability to predict election outcomes than asking people who they will vote for, particularly when the election remains months away.
Clinton leads that voter expectations question by a large margin, 53 percent to 42 percent.
After the Republican convention last month, Trump had narrowed the gap on that question, but Clinton has rebounded over the past week and a half.
Other surveys released last week have found the same trend toward Clinton, but have shown her with a bigger lead:
An NBC/Wall St. Journal survey found Clinton up nine points, 47-38 percent.
Fox News’ latest poll had Clinton up 10 points, 49-39 percent.
CNN had Clinton up by nine points, 52-43 percent, and CBS by 6.
A poll by Marist College for the McClatchy newspapers had the largest Clinton lead of all, 15 points.
Polls of swing states have also showed Clinton leading.
Surveys released last week by nonpartisan polling organizations had Clinton up by 4 points in Florida, 9 in Michigan, 13 in Pennsylvania and 15 in New Hampshire, all in hypothetical four-way match-ups that included Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein.
A poll by the Atlanta Journal Constitution found Clinton leading Trump by a small margin in Georgia, a state Democrats have not carried in a presidential election since Bill Clinton’s first victory in 1992.
The smaller margin in the USC/LA Times Daybreak poll than other national surveys stems in part from the seven-day rolling average, which minimizes the volatility that can lead to polls exaggerating the highs and lows of a campaign.
When large numbers of voters do change their minds in a short period, however, the average can cause the poll to lag.
Some analysts have also suggested that the way the poll is weighted has shifted the results a few points in Trump’s favor.
Every poll weighs results in order to make sure the survey sample matches known demographic facts, such as the right percentages of men and women or older and younger voters.
Each poll does that process differently, and until the votes are counted, there’s no way to know for sure which method was right.
The strength of the Daybreak tracking poll is that it allows close analysis of which groups of voters are moving toward or away from each candidate.
The poll uses a different methodology than most election surveys.
Instead of randomly contacting a different set of people for each survey, it uses a panel of 3,200 eligible voters, selected to be representative of the U.S. electorate. Those people are resurveyed continuously, 300400 per day.
As a result, shifts in the candidates’ standings reflect people changing their minds as opposed to variations in who responds from one survey to the next.
Each week, the poll has found that about three-quarters of the voters don’t significantly shift their preferences.
But in each of the poll’s four weeks so far, 20 percent -25 percent of the voters have shifted a significant amount — a reminder that with three months yet to go in the campaign, a lot of voters have not firmly made up their minds.
Meanwhile, the data so far for this past week show Trump has lost ground even among some of the groups that have given him the strongest support. More than 1 in 5 white voters soured on him, for example, as did a similar share of voters older than 65. In both groups, only about half as many voters moved in Trump’s direction.