Polling abyss

Trump looks into the polling abyss

No candidate in the modern era of polling has climbed back from a similar deficit in October to win the presidency.

By Steven Shepard

Donald Trump trailed Hillary Clinton on average by about 5 points prior to the leaked video of his sexually aggressive comments. Now, according to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll out on Monday, he trails by 14.

It might not matter either way: No candidate in the modern era of polling has ever climbed back from more than 4 points behind over the final month of the campaign to win the presidency.

That is the reality Republicans are confronting as the party grapples with how to handle an embattled but defiant nominee who many fear could drag down the rest of the GOP ticket with him.

Ronald Reagan was the last presidential nominee who managed a final-month comeback. But in 1980, when he surged past then-President Jimmy Carter, he was facing only a 4-point deficit in October.

Prior to that, the only other candidate to win the election after trailing by a similar margin in October was then-President Harry Truman. In the final month of the 1948 election, Truman lagged then-New York Gov. Thomas Dewey by a mid-single-digit margin, according to Gallup’s polling at the time. (While Gallup is eschewing horse-race polling this year, it remains the gold standard for historical presidential polling.)

Last Friday, before the video dropped, Clinton led Trump by 4.7 points in the RealClearPolitics average — though her margin in polls that also included Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein was smaller, 3.1 points.

Public polling has been limited since then. A POLITICO/Morning Consult poll conducted on Saturday, the day after the bombshell news, gave Clinton a 4-point lead over Trump: 45 percent to 41 person in a head-to-head contest.

The NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll — conducted on Saturday and Sunday — found a more profound change. Clinton led by 11 points in an initial question including Johnson and Stein, and by 14 points when matched up against only Trump.

That survey, conducted in the time between the Trump tape becoming public and Sunday night’s debate, took place during what could be a nadir for Trump’s campaign: a period in which more than two dozen GOP lawmakers and candidates abandoned the presidential nominee, and media chatter centered around whether the real estate mogul might actually be pressured to drop out of the race.

Trump, for his part, is questioning the veracity of the polls. At both of his events in Pennsylvania on Monday, he referenced Britain's referendum earlier this year to leave the European Union, which many viewed as an upset at the time, despite neck-and-neck polls.

"This is like Brexit, folks," Trump said Monday. "You watch."

But even before that poll, Trump was lagging among subgroups key to any possible resurgence: He has surrendered significant support among historically GOP-leaning groups, including female and college-educated white voters.

Whether the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll proves to be an outlier at Trump’s lowest moment, the GOP nominee remains in a precarious position. At this point four years ago, President Barack Obama’s lead over Mitt Romney, on average, was only a point — and he won by 4 points. Obama had a larger lead over John McCain on this date in October 2008: about 7 points, just a shade under his margin of victory in November.

George W. Bush opened up a lead as large as 4 points over John Kerry in October 2004. In 2000, Al Gore staged a fall comeback in the polls — eventually winning the popular vote by a narrow margin — but Bush won a majority of electoral votes.

If the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll is overstating the direness of his predicament, it will be because Trump manages to bring back some of the Republican voters he yielded this past weekend. In the poll, Trump is winning only 72 percent of Republicans, compared with Clinton, who captures 85 percent of Democrats. Trump’s post-tape performance among self-identified Republicans puts him 21 points behind Romney’s pace in 2012, according to exit polls.

But simply bringing back the Republican voters who drifted away this weekend won’t be enough, as the pre-tape polls indicate. He’ll also need to build on his numbers among women. If Trump does lose, the margin by which he falls matters a great deal to other Republican candidates on the ticket — anything approximating a double-digit defeat all but guarantees the House and Senate will go Democratic and Republicans in competitive races even further down ballot will be wiped out.

The NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll gave Democrats a 7-point lead on the question of which party voters want to control Congress next year.

It’s too early to know whether the damage to Trump will be lasting — especially since the post-tape polls thus far render a split decision on his standing relative to last week. Moreover, even the newest polls can’t gauge the impact of Sunday night’s second debate, if the rancorous clash moved the numbers at all.

But as Trump and his shoestring campaign monitor the upcoming public polling that will set a baseline for the deficit he must overcome in the final four weeks, Republicans across the country will also be watching to see how significant a drag he could be on their electoral prospects as well.

"Trump is in a weaker position" than the previous NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, Bill McInturff, the Republican pollster who co-produced the survey, told NBC News. "It also does not mean he can't get these points back."