Low in the polls...

How low can Trump go in the polls?

New surveys suggest the GOP nominee is perilously close to a historic rebuke.

By Steven Shepard

Polls conducted since the first presidential debate last month put Donald Trump on a pace to earn a smaller percentage of the vote than any major-party nominee in at least 20 years.

In matchups that include third-party candidates, Trump is winning, on average, 39.6 percent of the vote compared to 46.2 percent for Hillary Clinton in the dozen national polls using live-telephone interviewers conducted since September 26.

For much of the presidential campaign, the focus has been on Trump’s apparent ceiling: He has been unable to grow his coalition to the extent necessary to claim the lead over Clinton.

Now, though, after weeks of negative news coverage after Trump’s poor performance in the first debate, the tape of his sexually aggressive remarks leaked earlier this month and reports from a number of women claiming he sexually assaulted or harassed them, it’s also clear Trump has a floor of about 40 percent of the electorate.

That means, while he lags behind Clinton this year, Trump appears unlikely to end up with a smaller percentage of the vote than George H.W. Bush did in 1992 against Bill Clinton.

That’s largely a function of the country’s high degree of polarization and voters’ negative perception of Hillary Clinton, pollsters said, though Clinton’s favorable ratings are markedly better than Trump’s.

“In the end, it’s likely to be pretty much the same in other presidential elections, given the change in the demographics” from 2012, said Mark Mellman, a veteran Democratic pollster who worked for then-Sen. John Kerry in the 2004 presidential race.

Of all the new national and battleground-state polling out over the past few days, only two were conducted entirely after a number of women went public to claim Trump assaulted or harassed them. And those two polls show Clinton with some of her largest leads.

A CBS News poll, conducted last Wednesday (the day many of the allegations became public) through Sunday, gives Clinton an 11-point lead over Trump in an initial, two-way matchup. In a subsequent question that includes the third-party candidates, Clinton’s lead contracts to 9 points.

Clinton’s lead is 12 points in a Monmouth University poll conducted Friday through Sunday. The Monmouth poll was the most recent: Friday through Sunday.

Those two new polls — conducted at perhaps Trump’s lowest moment of the general election — not only have Clinton with large leads, but they also show Trump’s support cratering. Trump is at only 40 percent in the CBS News poll’s two-way matchup, and he earns just 38 percent in the four-way ballot test. The Monmouth poll also shows Trump at only 38 percent in a four-way ballot test.

That leaves Trump perilously close to a historic rebuke from American voters for a major-party candidate.

If Trump did slip below that 38-percent figure, it would be extraordinary in the modern era of presidential politics. With the presence of a strong third-party candidate in 1992, Ross Perot, George H.W. Bush earned about 37.5 percent of the vote. In his historic landslide loss in 1964, Barry Goldwater earned about 38.5 percent. Alf Landon won just 36.5 percent of the vote in a 1936 landslide loss against Franklin Roosevelt.

But even a Trump collapse wouldn’t challenge John Davis and William Howard Taft, who won between 20 and 30 percent of the vote in 1924 and 1912, respectively, as Progressive Party candidates siphoned significant shares of the vote.

Trump, however, isn’t likely to fall below his current standing.

Republicans could come back to Trump before Election Day if he manages to return to an even keel. In the CBS News poll, Trump wins 81 percent among Republicans, compared to Clinton’s 92 percent among Democrats. Similarly, Trump is at 79 percent among Republicans in the Monmouth poll, while Clinton is at 88 percent among Democrats.

During the ebbs and flows of the campaign, Clinton has retained a structural advantage over Trump. But when Trump has closed the gap, it has been from consolidating Republican votes.

Another potential boon to Trump: the significant third-party vote. In previous elections, the percentage of voters supporting minor-party candidates has been smaller than pre-election polls would indicate.

There’s a large, though declining, share of the vote lining up behind Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein. In the latest RealClearPolitics average, Johnson is at 6.2 percent, and Stein is at 2.2 percent.

“What we have known in the past is that third-party candidates are significantly higher in the polls than they are on Election Day,” said GOP pollster Christine Matthews. “Is that still true, or will Gary Johnson get 9 percent or 10 percent? Or will the normal rules apply, where you cut it by a fraction?”

The most striking exception to that rule was Perot in 1992. Perot — who withdrew from the race earlier in the year only to throw his hat back into the ring in October — earned nearly 19 percent of the vote on Election Day after running infomercials on broadcast-television networks in the closing days of the campaign to boost his numbers.

But if Trump’s poll numbers instead continue to tumble, it will be difficult to discern what is driving his decline. His fluctuations — from consolidating Republicans to make the race competitive, to repelling them after poor debate performances, scandal and intemperate remarks to put Clinton well ahead — have been one unpredictable element in an already-volatile election.

“I had assumed that the numbers wouldn’t move much from the first debate, and they moved more than I thought,” Democratic pollster Jef Pollock told POLITICO last week, before the most recent polls were released. “If the polls do plummet, and the bottom falls out, it’s going to be hard to predict what is mattering.”