Clinton Crash: Trump Closes Gap in Reuters Poll

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has made up significant ground against Hillary Clinton in the past few days in the Reuters/Ipsos poll, where he trailed by 12 points on Tuesday, 45%-33%, but is now behind only 5 points, 41%-36%.

When four candidates are included in the poll — taking in Green Party candidate Jill Stein and Libertarian Gary Johnson — Clinton’s lead narrows to just 3 points, 39%-36% — a statistical dead heat, given the poll’s margin of error of 3 points.

The poll was taken Aug. 22-25, over a period where Clinton accused Trump of aligning with the Ku Klux Klan and the “alt-right.” The same period also saw new revelations of pay-to-play corruption while Clinton was at the State Department.

Reuters reports:

The Aug. 22-25 opinion poll found that 41 percent of likely voters supported Clinton ahead of the Nov. 8 presidential election, while 36 percent supported Trump. Some 23 percent would not pick either candidate and answered “refused,” “other” or “wouldn’t vote.”

In a separate Reuters/Ipsos poll that includes candidates from small, alternative parties, Clinton leads the field by a smaller margin. Some 39 percent of likely voters supported Clinton in the four-way poll, compared with 36 percent for Trump, 7 percent for Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson and 3 percent for Green Party nominee Jill Stein.

Both polls were conducted online in English in all 50 states. They included 1,154 likely voters and have a credibility interval of 3 percentage points.

Other possible reasons given for the shift are Trump’s aggressive outreach to African-American voters, and his willingness to show flexibility on deportation.

One Clinton email chain that emerged this week suggested that the Secretary of State had granted meetings to people who could not access her through official channels, once they had donated significant amounts of money to her family’s foundation, which has been criticized for spending relatively little on charitable grants.

The Associated Press reported: “More than half the people outside the government who met with Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state gave money — either personally or through companies or groups — to the Clinton Foundation.”

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. His new book, See No Evil: 19 Hard Truths the Left Can’t Handle, is available from Regnery through Amazon. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.