Hillary Clinton holds a 6.8 point lead over Donald Trump heading into the home stretch of the campaign. | AP Photo 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’s terrible week on the campaign trail has placed him farther behind Hillary Clinton than at any point in the past two months.

Clinton now leads Trump by nearly 7 percentage points in a head-to-head matchup, according to the RealClearPolitics average as of Friday night — and it would be a full point larger if it wasn’t for the stubborn Los Angeles Times/USC Dornsife panel study, which showed Clinton and Trump tied on Friday.

That is Clinton’s largest lead in two months: Her lead topped out at nearly 8 points in early-to-mid August. It tracks with other aggregators and models: Clinton has a 7.9-point lead in the HuffPost Pollster model, reaching her highest point this week since mid-August. Clinton’s 89-percent odds of winning in The New York Times’ “Upshot” microsite’s model is higher than since late August. Clinton is above an 85-percent chance at victory in the FiveThirtyEight “polls-only” model for the first time since August 20.

Clinton’s most-recent surge appears to be mostly a function of a Trump drop. In the RealClearPolitics average, Clinton began to climb in the polls after the first debate in late September. But Trump has fallen precipitously since a video emerged last week of the now-GOP nominee making sexually aggressive comments off-camera 11 years ago. Any effect of the more than half-dozen women who’ve since come forward to claim that Trump made unwanted sexual advances toward them — or touched them sexually without consent — likely aren’t yet factored into the polls.





Even as he’s fallen nationally, Trump remained tied with Clinton in Ohio, according to a NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll, with the two deadlocked at 45 percent in a head-to-head matchup.

Ohio has been among the swing states where Trump has held up better, and the linchpin of his coalition there is less-educated white voters.

The NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll shows Trump leading Clinton among white voters without a college degree, 58 percent to 31 percent. That helps offset a 6-point Clinton lead with white college graduates, 48 percent to 42 percent.

White voters without a college degree make up about half the entire Ohio electorate, and they were 51 percent of the poll’s sample of likely voters.

Trump’s 58-percent share among whites without a college degree is precisely the target The New York Times’ Nate Cohn set for Trump to win Ohio — provided the GOP ran 5 points worse than Mitt Romney did among college-educated white voters and Hispanics. But poll after poll has showed Trump underachieving among college-educated white voters by a larger margin.





One important consequence of Trump’s post-tape slide has been decreased enthusiasm among some of the key groups behind his political success.

In this week’s Fox News poll, six-in-10 white registered voters with a college degree say they are “extremely interested” in this year’s election. But the percentage of whites without a college degree that are “extremely interested” is lower: just 48 percent.

That divide persists by gender: 60 percent of white men with college degrees are “extremely interested,” but only 46 percent of white males without a degree are. And while 59 percent of women with a college degree are “extremely interested,” 49 percent of non-college women are.

That tilts the race toward Clinton. Trump leads among all whites without a college degree by 25 points, 53 percent to 28 percent. That’s about 6 points ahead of where Romney ran in 2012.

But Trump is shedding more-educated white voters: Clinton actually has a 1-point advantage among whites with a degree, 42 percent to 41 percent. It’s a group Romney won four years ago by about 6 points — and unless Trump can bring disaffected, less-educated whites who haven’t voted regularly to the polls, he likely won’t surmount that arithmetic.

That less-educated white voters are less enthusiastic in the polls suggests Trump isn’t building a movement to overcome that.





Pennsylvania has emerged as Clinton’s Electoral College firewall in large part because of Trump’s weakness in the vote-rich counties surrounding Philadelphia.

A Bloomberg Politics poll out this week showed Clinton with a 9-point lead statewide — and a 28-point advantage in the four suburban Philadelphia counties: Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery.

With 59 percent of the vote in those four counties, Clinton is running 5 points ahead of President Barack Obama’s 2012 share there. But with just 31 percent, Trump is 13 points behind Romney’s pace in those four counties.

There’s little room for Trump to grow there: Only 28 percent of likely voters in the Philadelphia suburbs have a favorable opinion of the GOP nominee, while 70 percent view him unfavorably.

Clinton, meanwhile, is popular there: 56 percent view her favorably, and 42 percent have an unfavorable opinion.





Utah has long been one of the most reliably Republican states in the nation — Romney won 73 percent of the vote there in 2012, and John McCain won 63 percent in 2008 — but a perfect storm of political oddities threatens to turn it away from the GOP presidential nominee for the first time since 1964.

Two separate polls this week showed Clinton running close to Trump — in large part because Republicans were defecting to independent Evan McMullin, a Mormon who attended Brigham Young University in Provo.

The Monmouth University poll this week actually gave Trump a 6-point lead over Clinton, but only showed the Republican at 34 percent. McMullin, meanwhile, was a strong third at 20 percent.

But even if Trump carries Utah’s six electoral votes, it won’t be because voters there like him. Only 19 percent of likely voters in the Monmouth poll have a favorable opinion of Trump — which is actually lower than the percentages who view Clinton (25 percent) and McMullin (28 percent) unfavorably. Roughly 70 percent of likely voters view Trump and Clinton unfavorably, while McMullin’s unfavorable percentage is only 6 percent.

McMullin’s problem is name-identification: About two-thirds of likely voters, 66 percent, say they have no opinion of him.

The independent’s gambit has always been to deny Trump the state’s electoral votes and hope a close race nationally means that prevents either candidate from winning an Electoral College majority, forcing the election into the House.

If Clinton pulls away, that would be less likely, and a McMullin victory in Utah would be a historical footnote — though no less extraordinary.