Donald Trump leads Hillary Clinton by 2 percentage points in a hypothetical general election matchup, according to a new Public Policy Polling survey.
Trump received the support of 43 percent of those surveyed, followed by Clinton at 41 percent and Libertarian Gary Johnson at 3 percent.
North Carolina is expected to be a swing state, but the early polling shows Trump leading by the same margin that 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney defeated President Obama by four years ago.
“That’s a trend we’ve found in a lot of our recent polling — the race is shaping up very similarly to how things went between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney,” PPP explained on its website.
“Every place we’ve polled in the last month, we’ve found the Clinton/Trump race within a few points of where the Obama/Romney race ended up with the exception of Arizona, where there were a disproportionate share of Republican voters on the fence and we would expect them to eventually come home and give Trump a broader advantage.”
Interestingly, however, a hypothetical matchup between socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders and Trump gives the Democratic candidate a 3 percentage point advantage, 43-40, with Johnson still polling at 3 percent.
PPP surveyed 928 registered voters from May 20-22 with a 3.2-percentage-point margin of error. Approximately 80 percent of respondents were surveyed via phone and 20 percent of voters answered online.
