Donald Trump, whose recent campaign trips to Wisconsin suggested his campaign thought the Badger State might be in play, is losing to Hillary Clinton in a new poll of likely voters there. The Marquette University law school’s survey found in a head-to-head match-up, Clinton leads Trump by 4 percentage points, 46 percent to 42 percent. In a four-way race with Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson and Green nominee Jill Stein (who are on Wisconsin’s ballot), Clinton’s lead is wider, with 44 percent to Trump’s 37 percent. Johnson has nine percent support and Stein has three percent.
The previous MU Law poll, from mid-September, showed a much tighter contest, with Clinton leading Trump 41 percent to 38 percent in the four-way race.
Meanwhile, in Wisconsin’s U.S. Senate race, incumbent Republican Ron Johnson trails his Democratic challenger, former senator Russ Feingold, by just two point, 46 percent to 44 percent, with the Libertarian candidate getting 4 percent.
The Marquette poll has a good track record of reflecting close to the final result of several recent elections in Wisconsin. The last poll before the 2014 gubernatorial election, for instance, found a 7-point lead for Republican Scott Walker, even as other polls showed a 1- or 2-point race with Democratic challenger Mary Burke—the final result was a Walker victory by nearly 6 points.
In 2012, Wisconsin had not only the presidential race and a U.S. Senate race, but also a recall election for Walker earlier in the summer. In all three, Marquette’s final poll before Election Day was closer to the actual result than most other contemporary polls. In the recall, for instance, the Marquette poll showed Walker with a 7-point lead, nearly exactly reflecting the final vote margin of 6.7 points. A few months later in the general election, the Marquette poll found a much bigger margin for both Barack Obama and Democratic Senate candidate Tammy Baldwin than many other recent polls showed and more closely reflected the actual margins.
