Fifty-one percent of likely voters trust Donald Trump to do a better job on the economy if elected. | Getty 5 numbers that mattered this week

Continuing our POLITICO feature, where we dig into the latest polls and loop in other data streams to tell the story of the 2016 campaign. Here are five numbers that mattered this week.









Donald Trump closed to within a hair of Hillary Clinton in the race for president this week, and younger voters are a major reason why the GOP nominee’s prospects are rising.

That’s not because young voters like Trump: On the contrary, they are poised to reject him in record numbers.

But millennial voters aren’t getting behind Clinton to the extent she needs to put the race away, instead choosing one of the third-party candidates at rates that far exceed their older counterparts.

This week’s Quinnipiac University poll demonstrated their impact. In the initial ballot test, Clinton led Trump by 5 points — one of her better results this week. She led by 21 points among voters aged 18-34, 55 percent to 34 percent — roughly the same margin by which President Barack Obama won young voters in 2012.

But many of those young voters abandoned Clinton in a subsequent question that includes Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein, and it costs Clinton. Her 5-point lead over Trump dwindles to just 2 points, 41 percent to 39 percent.

Among that same 18-34 age cohort, Clinton wins only 31 percent of the vote on the four-way ballot, barely more than Trump (26 percent) or Johnson (29 percent). Even Stein, who is at 4 percent in the poll overall, wins 15 percent of younger voters.

The same phenomenon doesn’t happen with older voters. Among seniors aged 65 and older, Trump leads Clinton by 9 points in the head-to-head ballot test, 51 percent to 42 percent. And it barely changes on the four-way ballot: Trump’s lead stands at 7 points, 49 percent to 42 percent. Johnson, who wins nearly three-in-10 millennial voters, is only at 4 percent among seniors — and Stein is only at 1 percent.

Clinton lost younger voters to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders by wide margins in the Democratic primaries — and in an effort to shore up her standing, she’s deploying Sanders and other surrogates aimed at young voters this week. Both Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) are campaigning on college campuses in Ohio this weekend. First lady Michelle Obama was on the campus of George Mason University in Northern Virginia on Friday.





Despite the neck-and-neck race, Clinton still holds the edge on most issues, according to this week’s Fox News poll.

But not when it comes to the economy.

A slight majority of likely voters, 51 percent, say they trust Trump to do a better job on the economy if he is elected president, compared to 44 percent who trust Clinton.

The economy is quickly becoming a centerpiece of the Trump campaign. Even as he dealt this week with his past, false assertions that Obama was born outside the United States, Trump sought to pivot back to the economy.

Asked by The Washington Post Thursday why he was declining to address whether he still believed Obama wasn’t eligible to be president — Trump acknowledged that fact on Friday — the GOP presidential nominee said: “I want to focus on jobs. I want to focus on other things.”

Given Trump’s business background, an economic focus seems like a no-brainer. But the New York real-estate magnate has talked as much about immigration, the Supreme Court, trade and national security as he has about jobs.

Those other issues, however, aren’t clear winners for Trump, according to the Fox News poll. Likely voters trust Clinton more on immigration, 50 percent to 45 percent for Trump. And the two candidates are running even on appointing the next Supreme Court justice (Clinton 47 percent, Trump 46 percent) and handling terrorism and national security (Clinton 47 percent, Trump 46 percent).





Trump just concluded an expensive week on the airwaves, spending $961,000 on TV ads in Florida, $466,000 in North Carolina, $542,000 in Ohio and $561,000 in Pennsylvania.

But that concluded Friday night — and Trump isn’t advertising this weekend in those four critical battleground states.

It’s a prime example of the ad hoc manner in which the GOP nominee has conducted his paid-advertising campaign since he first went on the air a month ago. In those four states, Trump aired ads from August 19-September 7, spending a total of $9.4 million.

But then on September 8, the ads disappeared, only reemerging on September 12. (That absence included the September 11 anniversary, when both Clinton and Trump abstained from campaigning.)

Meanwhile, Trump launched one-week ad campaigns in early September in Colorado ($951,000), Iowa ($332,000), Michigan ($591,000), New Hampshire ($516,000), Nevada ($505,000) and Virginia ($2.2 million). But those ads all ended a week ago.

Now, after five days back on the air in the core four states, Trump is dropping off again this weekend, with no indication of whether he’ll go back up on Monday or later.

Clinton’s spending, meanwhile, has been steadier. With the exception of a one-day hiatus on September 11, Clinton has been airing ads in her target states without interruption.

From this past Tuesday through next Monday, Clinton is spending $139,000 in Arizona, $2.5 million in Florida, $246,000 in Iowa, $965,000 in North Carolina, $214,000 in New Hampshire, $544,000 in Nevada, $965,000 in Ohio and $1.3 million in Pennsylvania. That’s consistent with her spending in each of those states the week prior.

There are some signs the Trump campaign is ramping up for a more sustained air campaign. On Friday, Trump’s campaign bought ads on satellite-TV systems set to air from September 27, the day after the first debate, through November 7, the day before Election Day, in the following states: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire (which could also reach voters in Maine), North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Michigan and Virginia are the only states in which Trump has advertised previously that aren’t included in the satellite buy.





Down on the 2016 campaign, with its mudslinging, name-calling, negative advertisements and baskets of invective? You aren’t alone.

Two-thirds of voters think the campaign this year has been “more negative” than in past elections, according to the CBS News/New York Times poll out this week. Only 6 percent think the campaign has been “more positive,” and about a quarter, 24 percent, say it’s been “about the same” as past campaigns.

There’s an interesting party split: Democrats are significantly more likely to view the campaign more negatively: 78 percent say it’s been more negative than in the past, compared to just 55 percent of Republicans.

Americans have long taken a dim view toward modern presidential politics, but they see this campaign in even more negative terms: In an October 2012 poll, 37 percent said that campaign was more negative than in the past, while 52 percent classified it as “about the same.”





Trump isn’t the cause of a long-term realignment of the two political parties along class lines — but he appears to be accelerating an ongoing trend.

Republicans now hold a substantial party-ID advantage among white voters with only a high-school education, according to a new Pew Research Center study released this week.

The majority of white voters who have a high-school diploma or less, 59 percent, now identify as Republicans or say they lean toward the GOP, according to data aggregated from Pew’s polls this year. Only 33 percent of these voters identify as Democrats or lean toward the Democratic Party.

That’s rapid movement compared to other groups. Eight years ago, just as many of these voters identified as Democrats (44 percent) compared to Republicans (45 percent).

Overall, Republicans have gained compared to 2008, when Democrats prevailed up and down the ticket. That year, Democrats led in party-ID overall among registered voters, 51 percent to 39 percent.

Republicans closed that gap to just 4 points in 2012, 48 percent to 44 percent, and that’s where it sits so far in 2016. But the movement among non-college white voters continues apace: Republicans have gained a net 6 points among these voters, despite making no further headway overall.

Less-educated white voters are declining as an overall share of the electorate, as the nation becomes more diverse and more educated. White voters without a college degree (a larger group than the high-school-or-less cohort examined above) made up 63 percent of the electorate when Bill Clinton was first elected in 1992, according to the Pew data. But they now only make up 45 percent of the 2016 electorate.

While Trump is fueled in the polls by these voters, his reliance on them is less helpful for the GOP’s long-term prospects.