Washington
Clinton holds a 12-point lead, 51 percent to 39 percent, in the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll, which shows roughly two in three Americans saying the wealthy businessman is not qualified to be president. That includes roughly one-third of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents in the survey.
An NBC/Wall Street Journal survey, also released Sunday, showed a close contest. That poll showed virtually the same level of support for Trump as the Post/ABC survey, but a lower level of support for Clinton. It showed the former secretary of State leading 46 percent to 41 percent.
An average of all recent polls shows Clinton leading 46 percent to 39 percent.
The Post/ABC poll found the public in a somewhat contradictory mood about President Obama. On the one hand, it found Obama’s job approval at 56 percent, continuing a trend of increasing approval that many surveys have found this spring. On the other hand, it also found that after nearly eight years of Obama’s presidency, an identical 56 percent would like to see the country head in a new direction.
Trump wins about two-thirds of those who want to see a different direction, the Post/ABC poll found. That level of desire for change, however, is almost identical to what the same poll found in 1988 and 2004, both years in which the incumbent party won.
Trump has made an effort to capitalize on the desire for change by reaching for voters who supported Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries. Both surveys showed little sign of that strategy working. Only a small slice of Sanders’ supporters, 8 percent in the Post/ABC survey and 10 percent in the NBC/WSJ one, said they planned to back Trump.
Both surveys also showed Trump doing poorly among non-white voters. The Post/ABC survey found more than two-thirds of voters saying that Trump made racist comments about federal Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who is presiding over a fraud lawsuit against Trump University.
Trump leads among white voters, but with a sharp division along educational lines. Among whites with a college degree, Clinton led 50 percent to 42 percent, according to the Post/ABC poll.
If that holds up, she would be the first Democrat to capture a majority of college-educated white voters since modern polling began collecting such data in 1952.
Both surveys were conducted by telephone, including landlines and cellphones, through June 23. Each questioned roughly 1,000 people — all registered voters in the case of the NBC/WSJ survey, adults aged 18 and older for the Post/ABC poll. Each has a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points in either direction for the full sample.