The true state of the race appears to lie somewhere between the two polls out Sunday: a significant Hillary Clinton advantage on par with Barack Obama’s lead over John McCain in mid-October 2008. | Getty New polls show tale of 2 races

Two national polls released Sunday morning present diverging snapshots of where the presidential race stands: Hillary Clinton either has only a slight edge over Donald Trump — even after Trump’s disastrous week — or she can start measuring the drapes in the Oval Office.

Clinton leads Trump by a yawning, 11-point margin in a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 48 percent to 37 percent. That’s up slightly from a result released last week showing a nine-point Clinton lead.


But a new ABC News/Washington Post poll gives Clinton paints a different picture — just a four-point lead over Trump among likely voters, 47 percent to 43 percent. That’s a slight uptick from the organization's previous poll, from mid-September, while Clinton led Trump by two points.

Both polls are among the most rigorous national, public surveys. Both canvass likely voters, weeding out voters who are less likely to cast ballots, and call voters on landlines and cell phones. And both polls were conducted over the same time period: Monday-Thursday of last week, entirely after last Sunday’s second debate, but mostly before a series of women came forward to say Trump made unwanted sexual advances in a manner similar to what Trump himself described in the 2005 “Access Hollywood” video that emerged earlier this month.

Yet there's one enormous distinction: An 11-point gap with fewer than four weeks until Election Day looks insurmountable, while a 4-point deficit seems far more manageable.

Taking into account the margins of error that are attached to individual surveys — and the balance of the other public data released over the past week — the true state of the race appears to lie somewhere between the two polls out Sunday: a significant Clinton advantage on par with Barack Obama’s lead over John McCain in mid-October 2008, and a larger lead at this point than in the three other presidential elections over the past decade.

That’s evident in the polling averages. Factoring in the two new polls out on Sunday, Clinton leads Trump by 7.6 points in the HuffPost Pollster model of the two-way race as of midday Sunday, and by 5.9 points in a model of a race including third-party candidates.

Similarly, RealClearPolitics shows Clinton ahead by 5.5 points in both the two- and four-way averages. (Clinton’s advantage in the two-way RealClearPolitics average would be 6.8 points if the Los Angeles Times/USC Dornsife tracking panel, which is conducted differently than more traditional polls, is excluded.)

On this date in October 2008, Obama led McCain by 6.8 points in the RealClearPolitics average. That’s larger than Obama’s advantage over Mitt Romney in 2012, which was down to under a single percentage point in mid-October. President George W. Bush led John Kerry by about 3 points in mid-October 2004, and most polls also showed Bush with a slim advantage over Al Gore at this point in 2000.

While Sunday’s polls differ on Clinton’s margin, both surveys show Trump faces significant headwinds in closing the gap with Clinton, aside from the fact that he trails as Americans are already voting in a number of states.

The ABC News/Washington Post poll shows decreased enthusiasm among Trump’s supporters. Fewer than eight-in-10 Trump voters, 79 percent, say they are enthusiastic about the GOP nominee, while 83 percent of Clinton voters are enthusiastic about their candidate.

In fact, while Trump has been critical of Romney for failing to defeat Obama four years ago — at turns calling Romney a “failed candidate” who “choked like a dog” — enthusiasm for the former Massachusetts governor was 14 points greater in mid-October of 2012 than for Trump today.

Enthusiasm for Clinton is lagging behind that for Obama four years ago, too. Both figures suggest that neither candidate is likely to overperform their poll numbers on Election Day to a significant degree.

There’s also some evidence that the most recent negative news stories about Trump and women have taken a modest toll on his image. Among likely voters in the ABC News/Washington Post poll, 37 percent have a favorable impression of Trump, while 62 percent view Trump unfavorably, including 53 percent who view him “strongly unfavorably.”

In the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 29 percent of registered voters view Trump positively, and 62 percent have a negative impression of the New York real-estate magnate, including 52 percent who have a “very negative” impression.

Like the national polls, data from the battleground states are also diverging, but they are generally consistent with a significant-if-not-overwhelming Clinton advantage. Clinton has a 6-point lead over Trump in Nevada, according to a CBS News/YouGov poll, conducted over the internet. A live-caller poll conducted for KLAS-TV, the CBS affiliate in Las Vegas, gave Clinton a slightly smaller, 2-point advantage in the state.

Meanwhile, a new Christopher Newport University poll released Sunday shows Clinton with a massive, 15-point lead in Virginia: 44 percent to 29 percent. The Trump campaign is diverting some resources from Virginia, as reported last week.

While it’s now clear that Clinton is in a stronger position after two major events in the campaign — the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape of Trump on Oct. 7 and the second debate on Oct. 9 — it’s still too early to assess how voters feel about the roughly dozen women who allege that Trump touched them or attempted to touch them without their consent. Those stories — which Trump and his campaign deny categorically — began to reach a fever pitch last Wednesday night, and only one of the four nights of interviews in the ABC News/Washington Post and NBC News/Wall Street Journal polls, which were conducted Monday through Thursday, came after that night.

The CBS News/YouGov poll in Nevada is the most recent of the surveys, conducted Wednesday through Friday. The Christopher Newport University poll in Virginia was conducted Tuesday through Friday, The KLAS-TV poll in Nevada was conducted Monday through Thursday, the same dates as the ABC/Post and NBC/WSJ polls.

For his part, Trump — a prolific consumer of public polling data since the start of his campaign — is choosing to focus on the polls showing him only slightly behind Clinton.

“Polls close, but can you believe I lost large numbers of women voters based on made up events THAT NEVER HAPPENED,” Trump tweeted Sunday morning, after the ABC/Post poll was released, but before NBC and the Journal unveiled their poll. “Media rigging election!”