Donald Trump has now gained a small lead over Hillary Clinton that is outside of the margin of error according to a new poll out this morning by Rasmussen Reports:
Donald Trump has now grown his lead over Hillary Clinton in Rasmussen Reports’ first weekly White House Watch survey.
Trump earns 42% support to Clinton’s 37% when Likely U.S. Voters are asked whom they would vote for if the presidential election were held today. But Rasmussen Reports’ latest national telephone survey finds that 13% prefer some other candidate, while seven percent (7%) are undecided.
At the beginning of this month, Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, posted a statistically insignificant 41% to 39% lead over Clinton who is still expected to win the Democratic presidential nomination. Fifteen percent (15%) favored someone else, and five percent (5%) were undecided.
The latest findings were gathered the night before and the night after Trump’s announcement yesterday of 11 conservative judges he would consider for the current vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court, furthering his efforts to unify the party and end the #NeverTrump movement among some Republicans. Clinton on Tuesday eked out a primary win in Kentucky but lost the Oregon primary to Bernie Sanders as the race for the Democratic presidential nomination took a more chaotic turn.
Trump now gets 76% of the Republican vote, while Clinton has 72% Democratic support. Thirteen percent (13%) of Democrats prefer Trump, while nine percent (9%) of GOP voters favor Clinton. Among voters not affiliated with either major party, Trump leads 41% to 28%, but 31% of these voters either like another candidate or are undecided.
The survey of 1,000 Likely Voters was conducted on May 17-18, 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.
It’s a 5 point lead and while that’s a decent lead, it’s still early. The 20% of voters that lie between the ‘favored someone else’ and ‘undecided’ voters could easily reverse this lead in the future.