Democratic standard-bearer Hillary Clinton holds a solid lead over Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump heading into Monday’s highly anticipated first presidential debate, according to a new national tracking poll.
According to the new NBC/SurveyMonkey poll released Monday, Clinton leads Trump by 7 points in a head-to-head matchup (51/44 percent), and tops him by 5 points (45/40) in a four-way matchup.
In the latter poll, Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson wins 10 percent support. Green Party nominee Jill Stein takes 3 percent. Neither candidate will appear in Monday’s debate
The new national survey was taken from Sept. 19-25 and has a margin of error of 1.1 percent.
Clinton’s lead in the poll is largely due to support from millennials, who overwhelmingly supported Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries and President Obama in 2008 and 2012. She leads with 49 percent of voters aged 18-29 and 30-44. Trump, on the other hand, wins only 26 and 33 percent among the groups, respectively. The two candidates’ poll numbers are much closer in the older age brackets.
The poll comes after many others showed Trump slicing of Clinton’s lead nationally and in many battleground states. In a new CNN poll released Monday, Trump is neck-and-neck with the former secretary of state in Pennsylvania and Colorado.
