Yet another poll shows Hillary Clinton with a clear lead over Donald Trump going into the November election. This time it’s from Rasmussen, a GOP-leaning pollster that tends to slightly overstate Republicans’ chances of winning elections. In 2012, it predicted that Romney would narrowly defeat Obama, but Obama in fact won the election by a 4% margin.
The Rasmussen poll shows Clinton leading Trump by about five percentage points (41% to 36%). The good news for Trump is that fully 23% of voters polled were undecided, so Trump might have a chance to close the gap with Clinton. The bad news is that Rasmussen says Clinton’s lead over Trump has grown from 1% in December to 5% today.
Other recent polls are more grim for Trump. A CNN-ORC poll released on March 1 showed a clear majority of voters already preferring Clinton, with her leading Trump by a decisive 52% to 44% margin in the general election. Yet the same poll showed that Senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz would beat Clinton (Rubio would win by 3 points, and Cruz by 1 point). Clinton’s lead over Trump has substantially increased since the last CNN-ORC poll in January.
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Trump’s success in Republican primaries has not made him popular with the public as a whole. Only one of the states Trump won in the Super Tuesday primary was a swing state (Virginia), and he faces daunting odds there in November. Pollsters expect Trump will be defeated by a landslide in the general election in Virginia, even though Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio would be competitive with Clinton there. A recent Roanoke College poll says likely “Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton leads Donald Trump (52%-35%) and is statistically tied with Republican hopefuls Ted Cruz (45%-41%) and Marco Rubio (46%-43%), …. Donald Trump’s unfavorable rating is the highest of all contenders (63%, with 22% favorable, and 15% mixed/don’t know).” Similarly, Christopher Newport University’s poll of Virginia voters found that “Marco Rubio has the highest favorable rating among all candidates (44%),” with a 38% disapproval rating, while Trump has a staggering 64% disapproval rate.
