The race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump continues to tighten with less than two days before the first presidential debate, according to a new ABC News/Washington Post poll released Sunday.
Trump received his best numbers since the spring (44 percent) as he pulled within 2 percentage points of Clinton (46 percent), in a poll that considers a four-person race with Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson and Green Pary nominee Jill Stein included. The survey shows Clinton’s level of support has fluctuated slightly between 48 and 46 percent since June.
Most notably for Trump, the poll shows him making significant gains among non-college-educated white men. He leads in that category by 59 points (76 to 17 percent). By comparison, 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney won this group by 31 points.
Trump’s gains follow a mid-August shakeup of his struggling campaign, in which he hired Breitbart News’ Stephen Bannon to be his campaign’s chief executive and veteran Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway as his campaign manager. Meanwhile, Clinton has found herself in hot water after calling half of Trump’s supporters “deplorables” and her health has come under a microscope after a bout with pneumonia that during which she nearly fainted after attending a Sept. 11 event in New York City.
The two will go head-to-head in their first debate Monday night in New York, with NBC’s Lester Holt as moderator.
The poll results are within the margin of error, which is 3.5 percent.
The poll was conducted by landline and cellular telephone between Sept. 19-22 with a random national sample of 1,011 adults, including 651 likely voters. Of likely voters, the margin of error is 4.5 percent.
The pollers reported a partisan divide of 33-23-36 percent of Democrats-Republicans-independents, and among likely voters a 37-27-28 split.
