You’ve seen all of the headlines by now, I’m sure, including several examples here at Hot Air. The polls have been piling up since the end of the conventions and the news for Donald Trump is uniformly bad. To follow the themes of this coverage, the man is getting beaten worse than Stone Hands Duran at the feet of Sugar Ray Leonard. (You young folks can go Google those names. No mas!) And to be sure, there’s no question that Hillary Clinton has gotten a significant bounce in the polls after her own acceptance speech in Philadelphia just as Trump did after the big party in Cleveland. But is The Donald really out of the running? While the other polls were drawing all the gloom and doom headlines on CNN and MSNBC, the ongoing Reuters-Ipsos survey had a diffferent story to tell.

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s lead over Republican rival Donald Trump narrowed to less than 3 percentage points, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll released on Friday, down from nearly eight points on Monday. About 42 percent of likely voters favored Clinton, to Trump’s 39 percent, according to the July 31-Aug. 4 online poll of 1,154 likely voters. The poll had a credibility interval of plus or minus 3 percentage points, meaning that the results suggest the race is roughly even. Among registered voters over the same period, Clinton held a lead of five percentage points, down from eight percentage points on Monday, according to the poll.

This isn’t to say that Trump is zooming back out to some sort of massive lead, but there’s a key phrase to read in the first sentence of the second paragraph of that excerpted section. To see why it’s important, go back and take a look at that McClatchy-Marist poll that John wrote about yesterday. The numbers were certainly awful for Trump, but you really needed to look at the cross tabs. McClatchy had 1,132 adults which included 983 registered (not likely) voters.

Reuters, on the other hand, surveyed an almost identical number of likely voters, which many of the other pollsters won’t start doing until Labor Day. When they expanded their own survey out to just registered voters (which is still better than all adults, but not as good as likely voters) they too came up with a larger lead for Clinton in the range of five points.

It’s also impossible to write Reuters off as an outlier because they showed Clinton with a large lead right after the Democrats’ convention just like everyone else. (Eight points among likely voters rather than the double digit leads she had in some other surveys.) Look… the entire point here is not to say that Trump didn’t take a beating after the conventions. He’s generated a mountain of bad headlines, some of which is the usual media pile-on that every Republican gets but some which he brought on himself. His numbers are weaker than they were two weeks ago and there’s no denying it. But I’ll want to see a good number of additional surveys of likely voters before I begin carving his epitaph.