Is Donald Trump in free fall in the polls? Maybe so.
The release Monday of the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, reflecting interviewing on Saturday and Sunday — in other words, after the “Access Hollywood” tapes were released and before the second presidential debate — showed him trailing Hillary Clinton in a four-candidate pairing by a whopping 11-point margin. The results released today — i.e., with Monday post-debate interviewing included — show the margin narrowing to nine points (46 to 37 percent). Those are still dreadful numbers for Trump and for the Republican party.
My initial observation after the second debate was that Trump’s performance, much improved over the first debate though far from flawless, was good enough to stop the cascade of Republicans announcing their non-support and in some cases calling for him to resign the party’s nomination. That seems to have happened. The NBC/WSJ Monday night results suggest that some quantum of Republicans rallied to him after the debate performance, which I suspected would happen. But, importantly, not enough to make him competitive.
Yes, this is just one poll. It may turn out to be an outlier. But the polling news generally for Trump is bad. In the RealClearPolitics average of recent polls he was running 3.1 points behind Clinton before the first debate Sept. 26, and now — with the Monday NBC/WSJ numbers not factored in, he’s running 6.5 points behind. The pre-first debate gap looked bridgeable; the current gap looks very unlikely to be.
So is this presidential election over? Almost certainly. (As one who predicted President Romney four years ago, I insist on that “almost.”) Certainly Republicans seem to be acting on that assumption. House Speaker Paul Ryan’s advice to his members in the conference call yesterday — do your own thing — suggests he shares that view. So does Donald Trump’s defiant tweet, “It is so nice that the shackles have been taken off me and I can now fight for America the way I want to.”
This reminds me of what George McGovern did at about this point in his 1972 campaign. His attempts to raise economic and other issues against Richard Nixon weren’t getting him anywhere, and so he decided to make some elaborate speeches about what he really cared about — opposition to the Vietnam War. Unfortunately for him, polling showed that voters had concluded that Nixon was already bringing the war, or at least the American part therein, to an end. The speeches didn’t do McGovern much good except to buck up the spirits of many of his fervent supporters.
He got 38 percent of the vote. Trump is running slightly better than that, 40 percent in the RCP average, in a more polarized and faithfully partisan country.
Free fall? We’ll see.
