Poll: Clinton leads by double digits after Trump tape

Hillary Clinton led Donald Trump by double digits in an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll conducted this weekend in the days after video of Trump lewdly describing groping women but before Sunday night’s rancorous, nationally televised debate.

The poll shows Clinton leading Trump among likely voters, 46 percent to 35 percent, with Libertarian Gary Johnson at 9 percent and Green Party nominee Jill Stein at 2 percent. Four percent of voters said they wouldn’t choose any of those candidates, and another 4 percent weren’t sure.


When voters are asked to choose between only Clinton and Trump, the Democrat’s lead swells to 14 percentage points, 52 percent to 38 percent.

In the previous NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll — conducted in mid-September, before the first Clinton-Trump debate —Clinton had a 6-point lead on the four-way ballot, 43 percent to 37 percent, and a 7-point edge in a head-to-head matchup, 48 percent to 41 percent.

Among all registered voters in the latest survey, Trump’s image is strikingly negative: 63 percent have a negative opinion of the GOP nominee, including 52 percent who view him very negatively. Only 29 percent have a positive opinion of Trump.

Clinton’s image is markedly better, though still more negative (50 percent) than positive (40 percent), and 37 percent of voters view her very negatively.

The Trump tape, meanwhile, has boxed GOP leaders into a corner: Even before a debate in which the GOP nominee vigorously attacked Clinton — sometimes with questionable factual bases – two-thirds of Republican voters, 67 percent, said they wanted GOP congressional candidates to stand by Trump as the party’s nominee after a weekend of fallout from the Trump video. Only 14 percent said they wanted GOP candidates to call on Trump to end his campaign, and another 9 percent said they wanted those candidates to say they couldn’t support Trump anymore.

Trump’s slide has taken a toll on the GOP’s efforts to maintain its fragile Senate majority and more secure House majority, however. Forty-nine percent of registered voters now say they prefer Democrats control Congress next year, compared to only 42 percent who want a GOP-controlled Congress. That’s Democrats’ largest lead on the NBC/WSJ version of a generic ballot since the October 2013 government shutdown.

House Speaker Paul Ryan told GOP members of Congress on Monday that he will no longer defend Trump on the campaign trail, and that he was focused on protecting the party's House majority.

The poll was conducted Saturday and Sunday — October 8-9 — surveying 500 registered voters. The overall margin of error is plus or minus 4.4 percentage points.

For the presidential ballot tests, there were 447 likely voters, with a margin of error of plus or minus 4.6 percentage points.