Donald Trump is winning just 80 percent of likely voters who identify as Republicans, compared to Clinton’s 91-percent share of self-identified Democrats, according to a Quinnipiac University poll. | 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 was lagging well behind Hillary Clinton’s pace among his own partisans going into this week’s third and final debate.

A Quinnipiac University poll conducted in the two days prior to Wednesday’s debate showed Trump winning just 80 percent of likely voters who identify as Republicans, compared to Clinton’s 91-percent share of self-identified Democrats. Overall, Clinton led Trump by 7 points among likely voters, 47 percent to 40 percent.

Other polls also show Trump winning fewer Republicans than Clinton wins Democrats. A Fox News poll conducted last Saturday through Monday showed Clinton at 87 percent among Democrats but Trump with only 80 percent of Republicans.

While the state of the race after the final debate isn’t entirely clear, any Trump comeback depends first on bringing home Republicans who drifted away from him, then winning over swing voters.





Clinton is within striking distance in Georgia — down by only two points in an Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll released on Friday — despite winning only one-in-five white voters.

Overall, the poll shows Trump with a slight advantage in the GOP-leaning state, 44 percent to 42 percent. Among white voters, however, he leads Clinton by 45 points: 65 percent to 20 percent.

That seems like a massive advantage, but Trump is actually weaker with white voters than Mitt Romney was in 2012. There was no state-level exit poll in Georgia four years ago, but The New York Times estimates that Clinton’s 20-percent share is equal to President Barack Obama’s performance among white voters in the state.

Romney, meanwhile, won 79 percent of white voters in 2012. But more white voters are defecting to Libertarian Gary Johnson this year: The former New Mexico governor wins one-in-10 white voters, according to the poll.

Clinton is running about even with Obama’s pace among black voters, who accounted for about a third of the state's electorate in 2012. She leads Trump, 88 percent to 3 percent, with Johnson also capturing 3 percent of black voters.

Four years ago, Obama won black voters in Georgia, 93 percent to 6 percent, according to the Times’ estimates.





Virginia — a reliable Republican state until 2008 — is basically off the map for Trump, in large part due to his weakness with college-educated white voters.

A new Christopher Newport University poll released Friday shows Clinton leading Trump by 12 points, 45 percent to 33 percent.

Trump leads overall among white voters by 12 points, 44 percent to 32 percent. Clinton is a little short of the roughly 40 percent of the white vote Obama captured in 2012, but Trump is farther from Romney’s 60-percent baseline.

Clinton has an 8-point lead among white voters with a college degree, 41 percent to 33 percent.

Trump, meanwhile, leads by 45 points among white non-graduates, 62 percent to 17 percent. But he’s still short of Romney’s roughly two-thirds of the white-non-graduate vote.





Trump’s campaign insists it isn’t pulling out of Virginia, despite the polls showing Clinton well ahead. But the first signs are emerging that Trump is cutting back his investments in states where he trails Clinton badly.

The GOP nominee this week quietly scaled back the amount of money he’s planning to spend in Virginia next week. He’s now set to spend $265,000 on the Virginia airwaves, less than half his planned spending, with roughly half those cuts coming in the expensive D.C. market.

Virginia isn’t the only place where Trump is making significant cuts. Trump on Friday slashed his planned spending in New Hampshire next week in half — two days after a poll showed Clinton ahead by 15 points there. Trump is now set to spend $485,000 in New Hampshire next week instead of the originally planned $938,000.

POLITICO on Friday outlined the current battleground landscape and found Clinton solidly ahead in enough states to capture more than the 270 electoral votes needed to win — including the 13 from Virginia and 4 from New Hampshire. As of Friday night, Trump was sticking with his planned advertising in Colorado ($860,000), Florida ($3.7 million), Iowa ($408,000), Maine ($138,000), Nevada ($758,000), North Carolina ($1.1 million), Ohio ($1.1 million), Pennsylvania ($1.1 million) and Wisconsin ($354,000).





The debate over media bias in the election also extends to substantive differences among partisans about the role news outlets should play.

A Pew Research Center study in the field in late September and early October asked voters how the media should handle potentially offensive statements made by presidential candidates: emphasize them “because it is important for the public to know,” or don’t emphasize them “because it unfairly gives the candidate extra attention?”

Clinton and Trump had made comments along these lines earlier in the campaign — Trump slamming Arizona Sen. John McCain for being a prisoner of war or attacking the parents of a Muslim-American solider killed in Iraq, and Clinton describing some Trump backers as “deplorables” who are “irredeemable.”

Overall, 62 percent of voters said they want the media to emphasize those comments, while 35 percent think the media shouldn’t emphasize the comments. But among those who said they would vote for Trump, only 49 percent want the media to emphasize the comments, and 45 percent think they shouldn’t.

Clinton voters tilt the other way: 72 percent think the media should emphasize those comments, and only 26 percent think they shouldn’t.

The Pew poll, which was conducted mostly before a tape of Trump making sexually aggressive statements 11 years ago emerged, exposed another divide: More Clinton voters (77 percent) thought fact-checking is a major responsibility for the news media than Trump supporters (53 percent).