Both major-party presidential nominees were at 42 percent support or below in all seven national polls that included Gary Johnson and Jill Stein this week.
Less than two months from Election Day, the annual onslaught of surveys providing daily updates about the state of the race has arrived, and the third-party challengers are shown to be pulling significant support from the widely unpopular Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. The Republican and Democratic candidates registered between 39 and 42 percent in each poll concluding September 11 or afterward, and Johnson, the Libertarian party’s nominee, pulled at least eight percent in five of the seven countrywide surveys. Stein, the Green party representative, received a more modest two to four percent.
The depressed support for Trump and Clinton comes amid a tightening race, as the public continues to hold both candidates in low regard. Each has run into negative press this week: Trump because of the revival of his “birtherism” against President Obama and investigation of his charitable giving practices, and Clinton because of her health.
Johnson has managed to eat into their support, though a high-profile gaffe last week in which he failed to identify the heart of the Syrian civil war, Aleppo, became the biggest news story associated with his candidacy. In the four polls conducted entirely after that incident, he registered between five and eight percent support; in several polls that predated it and a few that overlapped with it, he broke 11 percent five times.
But the election wasn’t quite as noticeably close then as it is now, with the RealClearPolitics average shaking out to a 1.1-percentage point margin for Clinton. The back end of surveys included in that average, however, was most favorable to Clinton, with leads of three and five points. In the seven polls since then—those that were released this week—her lead was never greater than two points, with two surveys showing a tie and one a Trump edge of two points.
The average of the one-on-one, Trump versus Clinton results is similar, with Clinton holding a 1.5 percentage point lead. Most of those polls have Clinton with a modest advantage, but the one survey that has been consistently favorable to Trump throughout the election, the Los Angeles Times/USC tracking poll, shows Trump up six.
