In Arizona, Republican nominee for president Donald J. Trump leads Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton with 44 percent of the electorate to the former first lady’s 40 percent, while Libertarian Gary Johnson is at 8 percent and Green Party nominee Dr. Jill Stein is at one percent, according to the Breitbart News Network and Gravis Marketing poll of 1,244 likely Arizona voters conducted Aug. 27.
“The state polls tend to lag national movements, but it is interesting that Johnson is in the high single digits, when we have seen that fall and swing to Trump nationally,” said Doug Kaplan, the managing partner of Gravis Marketing, the Florida-based firm that executed the poll.
Trump’s 4-point lead is outside the survey’s 2.8 percent margin of error in a state that went for Republican Mitt Romney over President Barack Obama 53 percent to 44 percent, Kaplan said.
Clinton has the support of 75.2 percent of Democrats with the rest of the Democrats split: Johnson garnering 11.9 percent of Democrats, Trump 10.3 percent.
Trump has the support of 81.7 percent of Republicans. As for the rest of the GOP, 7.4 percent are supporting Clinton, while 3.3 percent are supporting Johnson.
When asked for their opinions of the candidates, 35 percent of Arizona poll participants held a strongly favorable opinion of Clinton, while 37 percent felt this way about Trump, 9 percent for Johnson, and 7 percent, Stein.
While Trump was the choice of 98.1 percent of the likely GOP voters who held a strongly favorable opinion of him, he was also the choice for president of 24.5 percent of Johnson supporters, 23.6 percent of Stein supporters and 20.8 percent of Clinton supporter.
Among the likely voters who think the economy is doing “great,” Clinton was the choice of 55.6 percent and Trump 34.6 percent. Trump, however, was the overwhelming choice of likely voters who said the economy was “not working” at 69 percent, with 87 percent of those who said the economy was giving them “serious anxiety” choosing Trump.
The poll, which was conducted last Saturday, comes before Trump’s immigration speech in Phoenix on Wednesday evening—and before his visit with the president of Mexico on Wednesday earlier in the day.
Some particularly confident Democrats think that Clinton has an outside chance in Arizona this cycle, and there is reason to believe this given the slight margin between her and Trump at this stage in the game, but Arizona traditionally votes for Republicans in statewide elections particularly for the presidency. If Trump somehow lost Arizona, and its 11 electoral votes, that would be catastrophic for his shot at 270—the number needed to win the presidency—but at this point the state seems to be in his camp for now.
The Washington Post’s Ed O’Keefe and John Wagner reported Aug. 9 that the former first lady’s campaign had shifted resources significantly into the state and into Georgia: “Representatives of Hillary Clinton’s campaign phoned state Democratic leaders in Arizona and Georgia this week to alert them of plans to begin transferring funds to hire more field organizers in those states, according to several Democratic officials familiar with the calls.”
That report did not mention any plans for Clinton television ads, but did lay out how in both Georgia and Arizona she was pushing six figure campaign investments to hire staff and build infrastructure.