Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump surged to a 3-point lead over Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in the USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times tracking poll on Tuesday. Trump now leads Clinton 45.8% to 42.8%, his largest lead since Aug. 31 and a 4.4% spike since Sep. 11.
The result is still within the poll’s margin of error. The “Daybreak” poll methodology is described as follows:
The USC Dornsife/L.A. Times Presidential Election “Daybreak” Poll asks more than 400 people each day about their voting intentions. The poll is part of the Understanding America Study (UAS) at the University of Southern California’s Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research.
Each day’s poll respondents are a subset of the UAS election panel, roughly 3000 U.S. citizens who were randomly recruited from among all households in the United States. Respondents are asked three predictive questions: What is the percent chance that (1) you will vote in the presidential election? (2) you will vote for Clinton, Trump, or someone else? and (3) Clinton, Trump or someone else will win?
Tuesday’s poll had 2,665 respondents.
Trump’s largest lead in the poll has been 7.3 points, recorded on July 28 during the height of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. From there, Trump fell steadily for over two weeks, hitting a low of 41.6% as Clinton hit a high of 46.3% on Aug. 14. The poll results narrowed after that, but the results for the past two days show an unusually large shift in Trump’s direction.
The improvement in Trump’s numbers follows a weekend in which Clinton referred to half of Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables,” and appeared to collapse at the 9/11 Memorial in New York City, raising serious concerns about her health.
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.
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