Hillary Clinton carries a slim 2-point lead over her Republican opponent in Ohio, a crucial battleground state that President Obama will visit next week to shore up support for his preferred successor.
The latest Monmouth University poll of likely voters in Ohio shows Clinton edging Donald Trump 44 to 42 percent, with Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson drawing 5 percent support and 6 percent of voters still undecided. Clinton carried a 4-point lead over Trump in mid-August.
Both Trump and Clinton are underperforming among the demographics their predecessors — Mitt Romney and Obama — won in 2012. Clinton carries a 58-point lead among black, Hispanic and Asian voters in the Buckeye State, whom Obama carried by a margin of 70 percentage points four years ago. Meanwhile, Trump leads the former secretary of state by 9 percentage points among white voters, a demographic Romney won by 16 percentage points in 2012.
The two candidates are running neck-and-neck in the central and southeastern parts of Ohio, while Trump has a 9-point lead in the regions north and west of the state’s capital city.
Far more voters said Clinton (59 percent) is temperamentally fit to be the next commander in chief than those who said the same of Trump (33 percent). The Democratic presidential hopeful was also seen as more likely than her GOP opponent to understand the everyday concerns of Americans.
As far as Ohio’s Senate race goes, incumbent Republican Sen. Rob Portman has grown his lead from 8 percentage points in August to 15 percentage points in the latest poll. He now leads former Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland 54 to 39 percent and carries a 23-point lead among independent voters.
Strickland has lost a significant chunk of outside support as more and more Democrats have come to view his chances of defeating Portman as slim to none.
The Monmouth University poll of 405 likely voters in Ohio was conducted from Oct. 1-4. Results contain a margin of error plus or minus 4.9 percentage points.
