Ohio
center stage as Trump takes five-point lead in key state
Bloomberg
survey, conducted during a stretch of bad headlines for Hillary
Clinton, follows trend of tightening polls across the country
Dan Roberts in
Washington
@RobertsDan
Wednesday 14
September 2016 19.13 BST
It was the
battleground state that swung it for George W Bush in 2004 and, once
again, Ohio looks to be taking center stage in a tightening
presidential race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
As both campaigns
wait to assess the impact of a bumpy weekend for Democrats, a shock
new poll from the Buckeye state released on Wednesday places Trump
five percentage points ahead, helping him lead in a rolling average
there for the first time.
The Bloomberg survey
was conducted between Friday and Monday, a period in which the
Clinton campaign admitted mishandling news of her pneumonia diagnosis
and the candidate made controversial comments, labeling half of
Trump’s supporters “a basket of deplorables”.
Trump was due to
appear at a rally in Canton, Ohio, on Wednesday evening, while
Clinton remained at her home in New York on doctor’s advice to rest
before her scheduled return to the campaign trail in North Carolina
on Thursday.
Trump’s own
disclosure record remained confused ahead of an expected television
discussion on the Dr Oz Show of his recent physical examination.
And his alleged
unfitness for office was underlined by leaked emails from former
Republican defense secretary Colin Powell, who called his party’s
nominee “a national disgrace” and an “international pariah”.
Ohio is a must-win
state for Trump, but not for Clinton, and the latest poll may well
just prove to be an outlier – only a week earlier another poll had
Clinton ahead in Ohio by seven points. Yet it also coincided with
signs of a more competitive race nationally, and in other key
battleground states.
A new national poll,
conducted by Ipsos for Reuters, showed a dead heat between Clinton
and Trump, down from a two-point lead for the Democrat in its past
few surveys. Likely voters asked to choose between the two
frontrunners or Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Jill Stein placed
Trump and Clinton neck-and-neck at 39% each. His national lead was
four points among independents.
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Another daily
tracking poll for the LA Times, which samples the same group of
voters on a regular basis, even placed Trump five points ahead in a
two-way national survey on Wednesday, although its methodology has
been called into question by some for showing a bias toward
Republican voters.
Nonetheless, few
pundits now disagree that there has been significant tightening in
the national race over the past couple of weeks. The closely watched
rolling average of national polls has shown Clinton’s lead over
Trump falling from eight points to two points in the last month,
after a summer bounce from party convention season began to erode.
“Trump has a one
in three chance of winning the election. It’s highly competitive,
folks,” wrote respected polling expert Nate Silver on Wedneday,
citing his website’s modeling analysis.
Rival analyst Nate
Cohn wrote in the New York Times on Wednesday that Clinton was
getting less of a boost than expected from Trump’s deep
unpopularity among African American and Latino voters.
Even Democrats
acknowledge the campaign is at a potentially critical point this
week, though they remain confident that Trump’s unpopularity is
putting once strongly Republican states into play as well as
traditional battlegrounds.
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“Arizona, Nevada
and New Hampshire are complete toss-ups,” wrote the Democratic
National Committee in a fundraising email to supporters on Wednesday.
“If we get out the vote in these states we can elect Hillary.”
Yet turnout and
enthusiasm seems to be part of the problem for Democrats.
“Our party
breakdown differs from other polls, but resembles what happened in
Ohio in 2004,” said Ann Selzer, the respected Iowa pollster who
conducted the much-discussed new poll for Bloomberg.
“It is very
difficult to say today who will and who will not show up to vote on
election day. Our poll suggests more Republicans than Democrats would
do that in an Ohio election held today, as they did in 2004 when
George W Bush carried the state by a narrow margin. In 2012, more
Democrats showed up.”
Earlier this week,
Clinton’s lead also appeared to halve in Pennsylvania, another
important test of Trump’s appeal to blue-collar voters.
And a new survey on
Tuesday even showed an unexpectedly competitive race in Maine.
Unusually it splits its four electoral college votes, and Trump is
ahead in the second congressional district, the mostly northerly tip
of the country, farthest away from his proposed wall with Mexico.
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