Politics

 

Trump/Clinton deadlocked in Real Clear Politics Average

By Dave Andrusko

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton

Very rarely does George Stephanopoulos (of “This Week with George Stephanopoulos”) bother to mention that he is a former aide to President Bill Clinton and a donor to the Clinton Foundation. You would think with Hillary Clinton in a ferocious tug of war with Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders that when Stephanopoulos is interviewing Sen. Sanders he might remind the audience of that connection.
But, of course, you would be wrong, as Newsbusters’s Nicholas Fondacaro noted yesterday.
I watched the Sunday interview today. When Fondacaro writes that “Stephanopoulos badgered Senator Sanders about his steep chances of winning and how he’s hurting the Democratic Party’s ability to win in November,” that is a fair characterization.
I mention this because Stephanopoulos’s why-don’t-you-get-out hectoring came after two recent major polls showed Clinton behind Trump but before the latest Rasmussen poll put Trump ahead by 5 points.
Allan Smith of Business Insider explained how, as a result,

The latest RealClearPolitics average of several recent polls puts Trump ahead of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by one-fifth of a percentage point. It is the first time Trump has overtaken Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner, in the gold-standard polling average.

Five recent polls were considered by RealClearPolitics. Trump led by 5 points in the latest Rasmussen poll, while he held leads of 3 points and 2 points over Clinton in the most recent Fox News and ABC News/Washington Post polls.

Clinton, meanwhile, held a 6-point lead over the Manhattan billionaire in the CBS News/New York Times poll. She was also up by 3 points in the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.

Looking for a sliver of a silver lining, H. A. Goodman wrote:

Although a bit more optimistic, HuffPost Pollster shows Clinton only up by 1.6 points over Trump. On April 15, 2016 Hillary Clinton was up by around 10 points, and on June 24th of last year, Trump trailed Clinton by about 20 points. The big issue with Clinton is that she doesn’t keep polling leads, and Election Day is over five months away.

But there is a long ways to go until November.

Source: NRLC News