Hillary Clinton’s national lead over Donald Trump continues to shrink amid renewed questions about her trustworthiness and her lack of transparency.
Clinton leads Trump among registered by just 4 points nationally, 48-44, according to an NBC News/Survey Monkey poll made public Tuesday.
But that’s a 2-point drop from the previous week, and her numbers have tumbled since the Democratic convention in July. After she accepted her party’s nomination in Philadelphia, Clinton was ahead of her Republican rival by 10 points.
In the weeks since, her campaign has struggled to address questions about the Clinton Foundation, her private email server and her refusal, until early September, to hold a press conference for nine months.
The NBC News/Survey Monkey poll, which began three days after the FBI released a scathing summary of its investigation of Clinton, showed the Democratic nominee’s advantage drop to 2 points when voters were asked to choose between her, Trump, Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein.
In the four-way matchup, support for Clinton dropped from 48 points to 44. Johnson netted 11 percent in the poll, which puts him shy of the 15 percent in select national polls he will need by mid-September to qualify for the first presidential debate on Sept. 26.
The survey of 16,220 registered voters was conducted between Sept. 5 and Sept. 11. During the last few days of the poll, Clinton said half of Trump’s supporters fit into a “basket of deplorables” comprised of racists, sexists, xenophobics and Islamaphobics. She later said she regretted the remark amid a critical backlash.
Clinton then attempted to mislead members of her traveling press corps after she collapsed two days later at a ceremony honoring the victims of 9/11, first telling the public she left the event because she felt overheated before admitting she had actually been diagnosed with pneumonia last week.
Because those events occurred so late in the survey period, they may not be reflected in the latest numbers.
