Donald Trump has increased his lead over Hillary Clinton in a new poll of voters from Missouri, where the two White House hopefuls faced off on Sunday for the second presidential debate.
The Republican nominee leads Clinton 46-41 in the latest Monmouth University survey of likely voters in Missouri, a 2-point increase since August. Support for Clinton has fallen off by 2 points in the same two-month period. Another 5 percent of voters back Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson, while 2 percent support Green Party candidate Jill Stein.
Survey respondents were interviewed after the leak of a 2005 audio tape in which Trump made sexually explicit comments about women, and while white men continue to support the GOP presidential hopeful by a wide margin, his appeal among women voters has declined by 12 points since August.
Earlier this summer, Trump led Clinton 54-36 percent among white women, who are now evenly divided at 42 percent support for each candidate. Nearly six in 10 respondents said they had listened to the controversial recording of Trump and another 33 percent had read or heard about it.
Nevertheless, only 5 percent of voters said they were “shocked” by the tape. A much larger percentage, 70 percent, indicated they were not surprised by what Trump had said, including his comment about grabbing women “by the pussy.”
“The recently released tapes and Trump’s temperament in general are not disqualifying factors for a significant chunk of Missouri voters,” Monmouth University polling director Patrick Murray said in a statement.
Incumbent Republican Sen. Roy Blunt, who stood by Trump in the wake of the audio tape scandal, leads his challenger, Missouri’s Democratic Secretary of State Jason Kander, by 2 points. Blunt previously carried a 5-point lead over Kander in August.
The survey of 406 likely voters in Missouri, a battleground state this cycle, was conducted from Oct. 9-11, with one-third of the interviews occurring after Sunday’s debate. Results contain a margin of error of plus or minus 4.9 percentage points.
