Hillary Clinton looks like she’s holding her ground in New Hampshire, if not nationally
Despite a somewhat tightening national race, Hillary Clinton looks to be holding her ground in New Hampshire.
A new Monmouth University poll Wednesday shows the Democratic presidential nominee leading Donald Trump in the Granite State by 9 percentage points.
Among 400 likely voters in the state polled from Saturday to Monday, 47 percent said they would vote for Clinton, 38 percent said they would for Trump, and 10 percent said they would vote for Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson. Green Party nominee Jill Stein got 1 percent support. Three percent remained undecided.
Trump led Clinton by 10 percentage points among men and by 7 percentage points among those without a college degree.
However, those advantages were eclipsed by Clinton’s leads among women and college-educated voters—both of which are a majority voting bloc in the state, both in the poll sample Wednesday and in past elections. Among likely female voters, Clinton led Trump by 26 percentage points and among voters with a college degree she led by 23 percentage points.
Eight of the last nine New Hampshire polls showed Clinton with a 5 percentage point lead or more. In six of those nine polls, her lead was 9 percentage points or more.
Monmouth also polled voters on Trump’s recent admission that President Barack Obama was born in the United States, after the candidate pushed a false conspiracy theory stating otherwise for roughly five years.
According to the poll, a vast majority of voters had heard of Trump’s concession, but just 29 percent said they think Trump actually believes Obama was born in the United States.
Eighty percent of voters said the development had no effect of their vote. Meanwhile, 15 percent said it made them less likely to support Trump, and 3 percent said it made them more likely to support the GOP nominee.
An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released Wednesday afternoon found Clinton leading Trump 43 percent to 37 nationally, with Johnson and Stein receiving 9 percent and 3 percent support, respectively.
Clinton’s 6 percentage point lead is slightly less than her 9 percentage point lead in the last NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, taken the week after the Democratic convention.
The 6-point lead, however, reflects a bit of a bounce back for Clinton, after much of the media focus last week was on her comments calling “half” of Trump supporters “deplorables,” as well as the candidate’s pneumonia diagnosis. Consequentially, Clinton saw her poll numbers slide.
Monmouth pollster Patrick Murray notes Clinton’s increased leads in Wednesday’s polls comes after Trump, much to his own detriment, stole the spotlight back with his birther backtrack.
“In this election, when the attention is on one of the candidates, it has not been good for that candidate,” Murray said.
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