Latest polls show Clinton leading Trump, but by a smaller margin

 

Three new surveys have been released over the last day or so, and let’s start with the latest NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll:

 

Hillary Clinton: 48% (down from 50% last week)

Donald Trump: 42% (unchanged since last week)

 

And here’s the Public Policy Polling results, as first reported by Rachel on the show last night:

 

Hillary Clinton 48% (down from 50% a month ago)

Donald Trump 43% (down from 45% a month ago)

 

And here’s the latest Monmouth University Poll, released yesterday afternoon:

 

Hillary Clinton 49% (up from 47% in June)

Donald Trump 42% (up from 40% in June)

 

Taken together, the good news for Democrats is that the Clinton/Kaine ticket is largely hanging on to the lead it built up after the parties’ national conventions. The good news for Republicans, meanwhile, is that the race hasn’t slipped away completely, and the GOP’s deficit appears to be shrinking a bit.

 

According to the Huffington Post‘s polling aggregator, for example, Clinton’s lead is just shy of 7 percentage points, which is actually an improvement for Trump from early August, when he trailed by roughly 8 points.

 

The New York Times‘ predictive model, meanwhile, shows Clinton with an 88% chance of winning the presidential election, which is down slightly from 90% a few days ago. FiveThirtyEight’s election forecast also show Clinton well positioned to succeed, though Trump’s odds have steadily-but-modestly improved since the first week in August.

 

* Postscript: While Election Day is exactly 70 days away, note that early voting begins in some parts of the country much sooner. The first presidential ballots will be cast in late September — less than a month from now — in Minnesota and South Dakota.