President Barack Obama's average approval rating is 50.7 percent. | 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.





For the first time since immediately after the Republican convention in July, Donald Trump led Hillary Clinton this week in a telephone survey conducted by live interviewers.

But perhaps more interesting in the CNN/ORC International poll conducted over Labor Day weekend and released Tuesday was the difference in the ballot test between the broader sample of all registered voters and the voters CNN determined are likely to vote.

Clinton actually led Trump among all registered voters, 44 percent to 41 percent. But among likely voters, Trump emerged with a 2-point advantage, 45 percent to 43 percent.

According to the CNN release, the poll included interviews with 886 registered voters — 786 of whom were determined to be likely voters. While some pollsters said that implies an 89 percent turnout rate, a back-of-the-envelope analysis of the 100 people who were screened out of the poll when the likely voter model was applied is revealing.

Without the raw data available, a rough look at those 100 non-likely voters suggests about half of them were Clinton supporters, while only about 10 percent were Trump supporters. (The rest said they would support Libertarian Gary Johnson, Green Party nominee Jill Stein or none of the candidates.)

Previous polls hadn’t suggested that kind of split between registered and likely voters. And while CNN/ORC was the only major live-interview pollster to conduct a survey over Labor Day weekend, more polls are coming soon that will either confirm or disagree with their findings.

GOP pollster Neil Newhouse, whom POLITICO interviewed on Tuesday after the release of the CNN/ORC poll, suggested that the likely voter model might be overstating Trump’s advantage — if Clinton’s campaign can mobilize and turn out voters who would otherwise be less likely to vote.

“That’s where Hillary’s ground game could help her,” said Newhouse.





According to Donald Trump, President Barack Obama’s administration, which has fewer than 19 weeks left until Obama leaves office, has been a “total disaster.” Vladimir Putin, the repressive ruler of the Russian Federation, has been “a leader far more than” Obama has been as president — and Obama has reduced U.S. military leadership to “rubble.”

But the American people don’t necessarily agree with his assessment of Obama’s presidency.

According to the RealClearPolitics average as of late Friday, a majority of Americans, 50.7 percent, approve of Obama’s job performance. Only 45.9 percent, on average, disapprove of Obama.

That doesn’t mean that all of the voters who approve of Obama are going to vote for Hillary Clinton. In a George Washington University Battleground poll released this week, Clinton led Trump by 2 points (42 percent to 40 percent), even though the spread was wider on Obama’s approval rating: 51 percent approve, versus 47 percent disapprove.

Fewer than 4-in-5 likely voters who approved of Obama’s job performance in that poll, 78 percent, said they would vote for Clinton. Trump gets 4 percent of these voters, Johnson gets 10 percent, Stein gets 4 percent and 3 percent are undecided.

Trump, meanwhile, is winning 80 percent of those who disapprove of Obama, with Johnson at 11 percent, Clinton at 3 percent, Stein at 1 percent and 5 percent undecided.





The two weeks leading up to the first of three general-election debates are all about setting expectations. Both campaigns can be expected to cast their opponent as the superior debater, lowering expectations for their own performance.

The Labor Day weekend CNN/ORC International poll establishes a baseline for that expectations-setting: Voters believe Clinton is a better debater than Trump.

Asked which candidate they think will do a better job in the debate, 53 percent of likely voters chose Clinton, while 43 percent picked Trump.

That suggests the pressure could be on Clinton when the two meet for the first time — at Hofstra University on Long Island on Sept. 26. Already, Clinton is trying to lower expectations for her performance.

“I am preparing for the debates. I’m doing my homework,” Clinton told reporters aboard her campaign aircraft this week. “Donald Trump is a self-proclaimed great debater who won every one of the Republican debates. So I take nothing for granted. I think this will be a difficult, challenging debate, which is why I’m going to be thinking hard about what I need to present the American people.”

But the expectations on Clinton aren’t as weighty as Barack Obama faced in both 2008 and 2012, according to CNN’s polling. Likely voters in each year said overwhelmingly expected that Obama (59 percent in both years) would be a better debater than John McCain (34 percent in 2008) and Mitt Romney (34 percent in 2012).





Ohio Sen. Rob Portman has built a commanding lead over Democrat Ted Strickland in what was once considered perhaps the nation’s marquee Senate race — even as the GOP presidential nominee is, at best, running even with Clinton in the key battleground state.

That’s because Portman, a first-term senator who entered his reelection cycle with relatively little name identification, is winning a significant number of crossover voters who are also supporting Clinton in the presidential race.

A Quinnipiac University poll out this week found Trump with a 1-point lead over Clinton in Ohio — but Portman has an 11-point lead over Strickland.

At POLITICO’s request, Quinnipiac provided additional crosstabs that showed Portman winning nearly 1-in-5 Clinton voters, 18 percent.

Strickland, meanwhile, is holding just 74 percent of Clinton voters — less than Portman’s 86 percent share of Trump voters.

Strickland, the former governor and congressman about whom Democrats bragged when he entered the race against Portman, has struggled to keep pace with the well-funded incumbent. In recent weeks, national Democrats have downplayed Strickland’s chances and reallocated money that was set to be spent in Ohio to other states.

Quinnipiac surveyed three other states, where they also found GOP senators running ahead of the party’s presidential standard-bearer. In Florida, incumbent Marco Rubio and Democratic Rep. Patrick Murphy are each winning 83 percent of their own presidential nominees’ supporters. But Rubio is capturing 16 percent of Clinton voters, while Murphy only wins 8 percent of Trump backers. (Rubio leads Murphy overall, 50 percent to 43 percent.)

In North Carolina, incumbent Sen. Richard Burr dominated Democrat Deborah Ross among Trump voters, 91 percent to 2 percent. Burr adds 10 percent of Clinton voters, building a 6-point lead over Ross, even as Clinton leads Trump in the state.

And in Pennsylvania, where Clinton leads Trump by 5 points, incumbent Sen. Pat Toomey does better with Trump voters (86 percent to 9 percent) than Democrat Katie McGinty does with Clinton voters (81 percent to 12 percent). Toomey has a negligible, 1-point lead over McGinty in the poll.





Trump isn’t just closing the gap with Clinton nationally, he’s also drawing closer in the swing states.

The Quinnipiac polls were neck-and-neck in Florida and Ohio — while Clinton’s lead in Pennsylvania is smaller per Quinnipiac than other polls have shown. And while Clinton led a Quinnipiac poll in North Carolina, a Suffolk University poll also out this week showed her trailing there.

But Clinton still has a fairly sizable lead in the POLITICO Battleground States polling average. She’s up 5.6 points overall, about a half-point closer than last week — each state’s surveys are weighted according to that state’s representation in the Electoral College — and she’s ahead in each of the 11 states included in the average.

The state polls, while more reflective of how presidential elections are conducted, can be a lagging indicator, thpugh.

The data are relatively old in some key states. In Iowa, one of the five polls included was conducted prior to both conventions. In Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire and Wisconsin, two of the five were conducted pre-conventions.

Overall, of the 54 polls included, 38 were conducted prior to Aug. 20. The state polls will likely be the better indicator of the state of the race closer to Election Day.