NEW YORK CITY, New York — Billionaire businessman and 2016 GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump has taken a three-point lead over Democratic nominee former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, a new poll from Boston’s Suffolk University shows.
Trump, at 44 percent, leads Clinton who trails him by three points with just 41 percent. Trump’s lead is inside the survey’s 4.4 percent margin of error. Libertarian Gary Johnson gets just four percent. The poll was conducted from Sept. 5 to Sept. 7 and surveyed 500 likely voters in the Tar Heel state.
“North Carolina is very close, and so is the gender gap margin, though it’s not quite working in Hillary Clinton’s favor with Johnson in the mix,” David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center in Boston, said in a press release announcing the poll results.
Demographically speaking, according to Suffolk, Trump has a huge advantage with white voters while Clinton has a similar advantage with black voters. Ultimately, though, Trump is making a dent in the black community in North Carolina, garnering seven percent of the vote.
“Clinton gained the support of 84 percent of African-American voters in North Carolina compared to 7 percent for Trump,” Suffolk University wrote. “However, among white voters Trump led Clinton 57 percent to 28 percent.”
The RealClearPolitics average in North Carolina shows the race being a tie between Clinton and Trump, as over the course of several polls throughout August the race narrowed after Clinton took a 9-point North Carolina lead in an early August NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.
North Carolina is one of about a dozen swing states the two candidates are targeting this cycle. President Barack Obama, a Democrat, won the state in 2008, but four years later GOP candidate Mitt Romney flipped it back into the Republican column. North Carolina’s 15 electoral votes are key to either Trump or Clinton.
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