Even as Donald Trump trails Hillary Clinton by a significant margin in national polls, 6.8 percent in the RealClearPolitics average of recent polls, he seems to do better in state surveys. Take the raft of results the Democratic firm PPP released today from five 2012 target states and Arizona, which some Democratic strategists think or hope their party can win.
The results showed Trump leading 44-40 percent in Arizona and Clinton leading in all five 2012 target states, but in four cases by between 2-4 percent and in the case of Wisconsin by 6 percent.
Both candidates finish under 50 percent in all six states. Between 12-20 percent are evidently undecided or intending to vote for a third or fourth candidate whose name the robocalling PPP did not offer as an alternative.
That’s a pretty high undecided rate for a race between two very well-known candidates, but plausible inasmuch as both get high unfavorable ratings from a majority of the electorate. (Has some poll analyst thought to look at the responses from those who have unfavorable feelings about both?)
Most interesting to me is that in most instances, Trump and Clinton are currently running short of the percentages actually won by their party’s 2012 nominees by almost exactly the same percentages. Two possible exceptions: Clinton runs 11 percent behind Obama 2012 in Iowa (where she just barely squeaked by Bernie Sanders in the caucuses) and Trump runs 9 points behind Romney 2012 in Arizona.
These are small differences that might just be statistical noise. But they do tend to show that, after all the ructions of the primaries and caucuses, and for all the weaknesses of each of the candidates, we are seeing general election pairings that look very similar to those we have become familiar with over the last 20 years.
As the fluent-in-French John Kerry or Mitt Romney might say, plus ca change …
