Trump falls way behind Clinton
Early opinion polls suggest Republican candidate staring at possible landslide defeat
WASHINGTON— It’s only the second week of August. There are three long months and three big debates to go. But. But. But. Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy seems to be teetering on the edge of competitive collapse. Once seemingly immune to the eternal laws of political gravity, the erratic Republican nominee has been dragged down to earth by the accumulated weight of his incomprehensible decisions.
Trump tried to stop his slide on Monday with a prepared economic speech in Detroit. He promised hefty tax cuts, fewer restrictions on oil and coal, an expanded child-care tax deduction that would largely benefit prosperous families, a “total renegotiation” of the North American Free Trade Agreement, and an explosion of jobs and wealth he said Hillary Clinton lacks the skills and vision to produce.
“She is the candidate of the past,” Trump said. “Ours is the campaign of the future.”
But a spate of opinion polls in the last two weeks suggests a campaign staring at the distinct possibility of a landslide defeat. In national polls, Clinton now leads Trump by eight percentage points— even bigger than the margin by which Barack Obama trounced John McCain in 2008.
The most recent poll, by well-regarded Monmouth University, has Trump trailing by a whopping 13 points. And polls of individual states look even worse for him. An election held today, they suggest, would be a bloodbath.
The statistical model on Five Thirty Eight, the website run by prominent analyst Nate Silver, gives Clinton a 78 per cent chance of victory, up from 63 per cent before the Repub- lican convention three weeks ago.
“Looking at the way the poll results are shaping up state by state, it looks like right now Hillary Clinton’s odds of victory are overwhelmingly high,” said Stephen Voss, a political science professor at the University of Kentucky. “If you believe the polling data — and I don’t just mean one organization’s polls — then it’s Hillary Clinton’s presidential election to lose.”
Trump is behind by an average of eight points in Pennsylvania, a Democratic-leaning state central to his plans to flip the Rust Belt.
In the swing state of Florida, a virtual must-win for him, the latest poll has him down six. Two supposed toss-ups, Virginia and Colorado, look more and more like safe Clinton states.
And Trump is having trouble defending even long-safe Republican strongholds. In the last two polls of Georgia, where Mitt Romney won by eight in 2012, Trump is down four and seven. In Arizona, where Romney won by nine, Trump is stuck in a tie.
“If you go by the polls, Trump is struggling in places where no Republican should struggle. And he only has an outside shot in the places that are supposed to be battlegrounds,” Voss said.
Trump, Voss cautioned, could be doing better than polls suggest. Silver cautioned that Clinton may merely be enjoying the traditional post-convention “bounce.”
These polls, moreover, were conducted during and just after the worst week of Trump’s campaign, in which he followed the Democratic convention by heaping insults upon the Muslim parents of a dead U.S. soldier and temporarily refusing to endorse Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan.
But the numbers get meaningful fast: the candidate who led in the polls taken two weeks after the conventions won the popular vote in the last 16 presidential elections, professors Christopher Wlezien and Robert S. Erikson have found. And almost all of the current numbers are bad news for Trump.
They show he has broadly alienated women, non-whites and voters with degrees — and that, perhaps most importantly, he has not managed to convince a majority of the electorate even that he is qualified for the job. In the new ABC/Washington Post poll, 61 per cent of voters said he is unqualified, while 60 per cent of voters said Clinton is qualified.
Most Republicans and independents are reluctant to vote for Clinton, said Marquette Law School Poll director Charles Franklin, “but for them to vote for Donald Trump would be psychologically difficult if they see her as qualified and him as not qualified.”
“And therefore, for those voters to come home to Trump, making it a more competitive race, they will have to get past the perception that he is not prepared for the office,” Franklin said.