By 2 in Florida

Poll: Trump leads Clinton by 2 in Florida

By Louis Nelson

A new poll puts Donald Trump ahead of Hillary Clinton by 2 percentage points in Florida, good news for the GOP nominee whose campaign has been starved for positive headlines in recent weeks.

The Manhattan billionaire leads the former secretary of state among Floridians likely to vote, 45 percent to 43 percent, according to the Bloomberg Politics poll released Wednesday. Libertarian Gary Johnson polled at 4 percent and Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, polled at 2 percent.

In a head-to-head matchup with Johnson and Stein removed, Trump leads Clinton by only a single point, 46 percent to 45 percent.

Trump is especially popular with Florida’s rural residents, who prefer him over Clinton by 31 points. He polled 14 points ahead of the former secretary of state in Florida’s panhandle and 10 points better than her among Floridians without a college degree.

Clinton polled especially well with nonwhite likely voters in Florida, who favored her by 33 points in the poll, and among those with a college degree, who preferred her by a 10 point margin. Geographically, she was especially strong with Miami-area voters, who favored her by 30 points in the poll.

Florida is one of a handful of must-win swing state for Trump if he is to thread the needle of his relatively narrow Electoral College path to victory on Election Night. Generally speaking, Clinton has polled better in the state and the Real Clear Politics polling average for Florida, which includes the Bloomberg poll, puts her ahead there by 1.6 points.

In the state’s Senate race, incumbent GOP Sen. Marco Rubio holds a 10 point lead over Democratic challenger Rep. Patrick Murphy, 51 percent to 41 percent. Like Trump, Rubio polled well in Florida’s panhandle, where he leads by 26 points, and among respondents without a college degree, who preferred him by 13 points. Catholic likely voters who responded to the poll also favored him by 24 points.

Hispanic voters were equally split between Murphy and Rubio, while nonwhite voters preferred the Democrat by 14 points. Rubio, a former GOP presidential candidate who dropped out after losing Florida’s primary badly to Trump, leads among Floridian men by 11 points and women by 8 points.

The Bloomberg Politics poll was conducted from Oct. 21-24, reaching 953 likely voters in Florida with a margin of error of plus-or-minus 3.2 percentage points. The poll oversampled Hispanic voters by 148.