Mitch Perry
Two new polls released Friday show Hillary Clinton leading Donald Trump in Florida, just two days after a Quinnipiac University survey showed Trump leading Clinton in the Sunshine State.
A NBC News-Wall Street Journal/Marist survey shows Clinton leading Trump, 44 percent to 37 percent. With third-party candidates Gary Johnson and Jill Stein added to the mix, Clinton only loses two percentage points — staying on top of Trump, 41 percent to 36 percent. Johnson gets 7 percent, and the Green Party’s Stein is at 4 percent.
Support for Trump among blacks is at 5 percent in Florida, lower than the 7 percent Mitt Romney received in Florida in 2012. Somewhat alarmingly for Clinton, however, is that her lead shrinks when the poll is limited just to voters who say they definitely will vote in the fall, narrowing to just three percentage points in Florida.
The Florida survey was one of four in battleground states conducted by NBC News/WSJ — Clinton leads in all four of them.
“With 66 electoral votes at stake in these four states, Donald Trump is playing catch-up against Hillary Clinton,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion, which conducted the new surveys. “Clinton’s single-digit lead in each of these states is due to her slight advantage in how voters perceive these two candidates.”
The NBC/WSJ/Marist survey was conducted between July 5-July 10 of 871 registered voters in Florida, with a margin of error of +/- 3.3 percent.
Meanwhile, Clinton leads Trump, 45 percent to 40 percent in a Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research survey. Libertarian Gary Johnson receives 6 percent support, and 7 percent remain undecided.
News of this poll was first reported by POLITICO Florida.
“This data demonstrates that Donald Trump has a lot of ground to make up with the voters he needs to win,” said Jill Hanauer, CEO of Project New America, who conducted the poll.
This survey was conducted among 1,100 Florida likely general election voters from July 6-10, 2016. It carries a margin of error of +/- 4.1 points.
