REPORTS
Thursday, July 14,
2016
Just days before the
Republican National Convention is expected to formally nominate him to run for
president, Donald Trump has taken his largest lead yet over Hillary Clinton.
The latest Rasmussen
Reports weekly White House Watch survey of Likely U.S. Voters finds Trump with
44% support to Clinton’s 37%. Thirteen percent (13%) favor some other
candidate, and six percent (6%) are undecided. (To see survey question wording,
click here.)
This is the third week
in a row that Trump has held the lead, although last week
he was ahead by a statistically insignificant 42% to 40%. This week’s findings
represent Trump’s
highest level of support in surveys since last October and show Clinton
continuing to lose ground.
Trump now has the
support of 80% of Republicans and 13% of Democrats. Clinton earns just 72% of
the Democratic vote and picks up five percent (5%) of Republicans. Among voters
not affiliated with either major party, Trump leads by 13 points, but 27% of
these voters either like another candidate or are undecided.
Perhaps more
troubling for Clinton is that she now trails by 17 points among white voters
after the murder last week of five white policemen in Dallas which Trump has
attributed to anti-police rhetoric by President Obama, Clinton and others. This
is a noticeably wider gap than we have seen previously, while her support among
black and other minority voters remains unchanged.
The survey of 1,000
Likely Voters was conducted on July 12-13, 2016 by Rasmussen Reports. The
margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence.
Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion
Research, LLC. See methodology.
Democrats, however,
are much more confident than Republicans that their
presidential nominee will help their congressional candidates win in
November.
Clinton is now the
candidate with the bigger gender gap problem. She leads by eight points among
women voters, but Trump posts a 21-point lead among men.
The Republican
continues to lead among those 40 and over, but the candidates are now tied
among younger voters. Still, those under 40 are also far more likely than their
elders to like another candidate or be undecided.
Trump leads among
voters in all income groups now except those who earn under $30,000 a year.
As recently as last
week, Trump and Clinton were running neck-and-neck if
Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson was added to the ballot.
Clinton was endorsed
this week by her primary rival, Senator Bernie Sanders. Forty-four percent
(44%) of Likely Democratic Voters told Rasmussen Reports late last month that
they would vote for Sanders if he was on the ballot this November, but just
24% said they were more likely to vote for Clinton because of Sanders’
endorsement.
Fifty-five percent
(55%) of whites and 52% of other minority voters now think there is a
war on police in America, but only 31% of blacks agree. However, 60% of all
voters think comments critical of the police made by some politicians make it
more dangerous for police officers to do their job.
Democrats are a lot
more enthusiastic about Clinton’s
plan for so-called “free” college than other Americans are, but all agree
that taxpayers will be the ones who pick up the tab.
An ABC News survey
this week confirmed what Rasmussen Reports first reported a week ago: Most
voters disagree with the FBI’s decision not to seek a felony indictment of
Clinton for mishandling classified information while serving as secretary
of State.
