Los Angeles, California - Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is steadily gaining over Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in the wake of the Republican National Convention, according to the USC Dornsife/LA Times Presidential Election Daybreak Poll
Just before the convention began, the daily poll had shown the two candidates were tied at 42 percent. Now, 46 percent of the poll’s participants say they would vote for Trump, compared with 41 percent for Clinton. However, the difference is well within the poll’s margin of error of plus or minus 5 percent.
“Trump continues to lead among some eligible voter groups, and may now have a slight edge on Clinton among young people and those with moderate incomes,” said Jill Darling, survey director of the Understanding America Study at USC Dornsife’s Center for Economic and Social Research. “However, he does not yet have enough new supporters to lift his overall lead over Clinton outside the poll’s margin of sampling error.”
“Even while the race remains very close, there’s no question that Donald Trump has benefited from a steady increase in our poll since the close of his party’s convention,” said Dan Schnur, director of USC’s Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics. “The combination of the attention that his acceptance speech received and the weekend controversy over the Democratic National Committee email leaks has given him a small but growing lead heading into the Democratic convention. We’ll see over the next few days whether Hillary Clinton and her allies are able to reverse this trend.”
Since the poll began, most participants believed that, come November, Clinton would prevail. But her advantage has eroded from 12 percentage points to nearly 6 percentage points, with 50 percent now predicting Clinton, versus 44 percent predicting Trump.
Demographic differences
Trump now edges Clinton among young eligible voters aged 18 to 34, 42 percent to 40 percent. He also has a slight advantage among people with a household income of $75,000 a year or more, 46 percent to 43 percent.
But Trump has a nearly 11 percentage point advantage over Clinton among eligible voters 65 and older. He has a 17 percentage point advantage among those whose annual incomes fall between $35,000 to $75,000. He holds a statistically significant lead among whites (56 percent to 32 percent) and among men (53 percent to 37 percent).
Clinton fares better among eligible voters who hold a college degree (50 percent to 29 percent), Hispanics (54 percent to 32 percent) and African Americans (82 percent to 3 percent).
The margin is tight among women voters: 46 percent for Clinton versus 40 percent for Trump.
A detailed breakdown of the poll demographics is here.
About the Daybreak Poll
The Daybreak Poll is a probability poll that will provide a best estimate of how America plans to vote in the November election. Updated nightly, results are based on repeated participation by a large panel of Americans representing a random sample of diverse households nationwide.
Only a few such daily probability polls exist in the country. The Daybreak Poll is part of the ongoing Understanding America Study at the USC Dornsife’s Center for Economic and Social Research. It is conducted in partnership with the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics (also at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences) and with The Los Angeles Times.
More than 3,200 participants in the Understanding America Study are on the election panel. Of those, 450 are invited daily to participate in the Daybreak Poll to ensure a balanced sample. Each day at midnight, researchers update the results, which are based on a week’s worth of responses. Learn more about the methodology here. A detailed demographic breakdown of the latest poll results are here.
The Daybreak Poll results are publicly available on three sites: election.usc.edu, at the Unruh Institute site and the LA Times politics page.
