Hillary Clinton now leads in three of four key swing states, but Donald Trump continues to hold the edge in Ohio. The latest Quinnnipiac poll shows most voters think Clinton won the first presidential debate, but as WKSU’s M.L. Schultze reports, that’s apparently changed very few minds.
The poll shows Clinton breaking out of a tie in Florida and holding onto slim leads in North Carolina and Pennsylvania. But in Ohio, Donald Trump has opened his lead among likely voters to 5 percentage points. And it appears voters who were leaning toward third parties a month ago are moving into the Republican and Democratic camps.
The Quinnipiac poll shows 47 percent say they’d vote for Trump if the election were held today, compared to 42 percent for Clinton.
Only 6 percent said they’d go for Libertarian Gary Johnson and 1 percent for the Green Party’s Jill Stein. That’s less than half the commitment to third parties (18 percent) in the Quinnipiac poll in early September.
When it comes to Trump and Clinton, there’s a gender gap in Ohio as in the other states, but not as wide: Trump is more popular among men than Clinton is among women, and he holds a huge lead among voters who identify as independent. (Fifty-two percent say Trump would get their vote; only a third are leaning toward Clinton.)
In a head-to-head matchup without the third-party candidates, Clinton is trailing Trump by 3 percentage points. That’s grown from just 1 percent in September. And as recently as August, Clinton was leading Trump in Ohio.
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