Donald Trump’s poll dominance has nearly matched Hillary Clinton’s
In the new Washington Post-ABC News poll that dropped at midnight Tuesday,
Donald Trump has reached a new high relative to all of our surveys in 2015. At 38 percent, Trump is backed by more than 1 in 3 Republicans. Hillary Clinton is still backed by more than half of Democrats, mind you, but Trump's average in Real Clear Politics's aggregation of polls has now also hit a new high.
It is also no longer the case that more Americans support Bernie Sanders than Trump. Sanders still pulls in a decent chunk of the Democratic electorate, but his percentages have dipped below Trumpian levels.
Because Clinton is running against one reasonably strong competitor and Trump is running against roughly 1,800 weak ones, there's something else remarkable about the state of the field right now: Trump's lead is nearly as big as Clinton's. The most recent averages for each has Clinton's lead only 5.5 points larger than Trump's — the closest it has been all year.
This is national polling, which doesn't mean a whole lot in general. What really matters is who can win each state, such as, say, New Hampshire. There, Trump's lead is 16.7 points over his closest rival, while the leading Democrat is up by only 5 points.
And that leading Democrat is Bernie Sanders.
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