Election Day is still 22 days away, and a lot can happen in three weeks, but in light of the latest polling in the presidential race, Hillary Clinton has to like her chances.
Hillary Clinton is ahead of Donald Trump by double digits with just over three weeks until Election Day, according to a new national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll conducted entirely after the second presidential debate.In a four-way race, Democrat Clinton holds an 11-point lead over Republican Trump among likely voters, 48 percent to 37 percent, with Libertarian Gary Johnson at 7 percent and the Green Party’s Jill Stein at 2 percent. In a two-way contest without Johnson and Stein, Clinton is ahead by 10 points, 51 percent to 41 percent.
Note, not every poll shows Clinton with an advantage nearly that large. Yesterday, the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll found a far more competitive race, with the former Secretary of State leading by just four points, with Trump drawing support from GOP partisans — including many of those who believe he’s guilty of sexually assaulting women.Obviously, there’s a pretty significant difference between a 4-point race and an 11-point race, which is why averages help paint a broader picture. Polling aggregators now put Clinton’s lead between five and seven points. In the modern polling era, no candidate has ever overcome that kind of deficit in in an election’s closing weeks.Also of interest, the Wall Street Journal added, “The clearest dividing line in this year’s presidential election now falls along educational lines: Whites without a college degree have consolidated behind Donald Trump and those with a four-year degree are tending to back Hillary Clinton.” This is consistent across multiple surveys over the course of several months: the more formal education a voter has received, the more likely he or she is to support Clinton.The latest polling from individual states is similarly discouraging for Trump backers. Clinton appears to be pulling away in Virginia — reports last week suggested the Republican ticket is abandoning the commonwealth, seeing it as unwinnable — and in Florida, PPP’s latest found Clinton leading Trump by four points in a four-way contest. (Her lead grows to five points in a head-to-head match-up.)The news was slightly better for the GOP ticket in Indiana, where the latest Monmouth University poll showed Trump leading Clinton, 45% to 41%, in a four-way race. That said, given the state’s red-state status, and the fact that Indiana’s current governor is on the Republican ticket, Trump’s lead probably ought to be larger.As of this morning, the New York Times‘ Upshot predictive model shows Clinton with a 90% chance of winning the presidential election — that ties her best odds of the year — up sharply from her 70% standing in late September. FiveThirtyEight has a few different forecast models, but they’re all roughly in line with the Times’ projection.
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Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."