Craig Gilbert

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

The bad news for Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin is that her lead over Donald Trump is uncomfortably narrow in a state her party has been winning for decades.

The bad news for Trump is that he remains chronically behind here, even after tightening the gap with Clinton nationally.

Clinton leads Trump by three points among likely voters in a new poll by the Marquette University Law School.

She has 41%, followed by Trump at 38%, Libertarian Gary Johnson at 11% and Green Party candidate Jill Stein at 2%.

Clinton’s lead was identical in Marquette’s previous poll taken in late August.

Among the broader pool of registered voters, she leads Trump by four points in the same four-way matchup, down slightly from five points last month.

The new survey suggests that on the eve of the first presidential debate Monday, the race for Wisconsin has settled into a tight battle between scarred contenders with sky-high negatives among independent and undecided voters.

Clinton, Feingold maintain leads in Marquette poll

But it’s also one in which Clinton still has the upper hand. She has led in every major independent poll in Wisconsin this year. Neither campaign has elected to advertise on television here. In a two-way race with Trump, Clinton’s lead among registered voters has been very consistent in five Marquette polls since June, except for her post-convention August bounce: 7, 7, 10, 5 and 5 points.

“It’s a close presidential race,” says Marquette pollster Charles Franklin.

“But Clinton continues to lead as she has in all of the polling we’ve done up until now … that highlights how important Monday could be,” he said of the first of three debates.

The race seems exceedingly unsettled here in key respects. With two candidates dogged by high negatives, the “undecided vote” is unusually high for a presidential contest in September.

Undecided voters

In a two-way matchup between Clinton and Trump, 15% of registered voters are undecided, down slightly from last month; 12% of likely voters are undecided, up slightly from last month. In both cases, the number of undecided voters is much higher than it was in 2012 race.

Large numbers of voters in both parties are dissatisfied with their standard-bearers.

About two-thirds (68%) of GOP voters would prefer a different Republican nominee, and roughly half (48%) of Democratic voters would prefer Clintons’ chief rival, Bernie Sanders, as their party’s nominee.

A large minority of these dissatisfied partisans on both sides is withholding its support. A small portion is crossing over to support the other party’s nominee. A larger portion on both sides is backing Johnson, the Libertarian.

The combination of undecided voters and people supporting a third-party candidate is depressing the vote for both Trump and Clinton, and could add to the volatility of the campaign in the weeks that remain.

It is striking that in a four-way race, the leader in Wisconsin (Clinton) is drawing only 41% of likely voters and just 39% of registered voters. Barack Obama won this state with 56% in 2008 and 53% in 2012.

Johnson, the top third-party candidate, is taking votes from both Clinton and Trump, the poll suggests. He’s getting 17% of the Republican voters who didn’t want Trump as their nominee and 15% of the Democratic voters who didn’t want Clinton as their nominee.

The net effect on the race is close to a wash at this point. It is still not clear whether the presence of Johnson and Stein is hurting Clinton more than Trump or Trump more than Clinton. In both September and August, Clinton’s lead is virtually the same in a four-way matchup as it is in a two-way matchup.

But “the third-party candidates and undecided are playing a big role in the margins here. If either of these groups came home to the party, it could shift the balance considerably,” Franklin said. “If they stay outside the party, it’s going to hold down the total vote for both major-party candidates.”

While that injects a large dose of uncertainty, there are also some very entrenched patterns in the polling this year. Those patterns are keeping the race close, but they are also keeping Trump from overtaking Clinton.

One is that Clinton continues to get more support from her party than Trump does from his.

In five Marquette polls since June, Clinton has drawn between 85% and 93% of the Democratic vote; Trump has drawn between 79% and 81% of the GOP vote — a figure that has hardly budged in three months.

This “loyalty gap” between the two has narrowed a bit in the latest poll, but it’s a persistent problem for Trump. His image within the Republican Party is more negative than it should be for a GOP nominee, and it hasn’t really improved in recent months. Back in June, he was viewed negatively by 24% of GOP voters. In the latest poll, he is viewed negatively by 25%. (Clinton is viewed negatively by 10% of Democrats in Wisconsin).

Gender gap

Another pattern dogging Trump is the massive gender gap in the race.

Clinton does much better among women than men, and Trump does much better among men than women.

But Trump’s problems with women (a 68% unfavorable rate) remain bigger than Clinton’s problems with men (a 62% unfavorable rate) — and that has been true all year.

Her lead among women is 20 points. His lead among men is 12.

It is hard to imagine Trump catching Clinton here as long as his partisan base is weaker, and as long as his favorability rating among women is mired in the low to mid-20s.

Even though her lead didn’t grow in Wisconsin since last month, there was a notably positive development in the survey for Clinton. Her image in the state actually improved here despite a rough few weeks politically that eroded her edge in national surveys, including her health problems with pneumonia. Clinton’s negative rating in the state (50% of registered voters view her unfavorably) was her lowest all year.

Both candidates continue to languish among independent voters (the one in three registered voters who don’t identify with either party). Trump is viewed negatively by 63% of independents and Clinton is viewed negatively by 52%.

The result is that if this race were decided just by independents, it would be a remarkably fractured contest, with Clinton drawing 32%, Trump 27%, Johnson 21%, Stein 6% and 13% undecided.

The survey was conducted Thursday through Sunday. Marquette interviewed 802 registered voters and 677 likely voters (those who said they were absolutely certain to vote). The margin of error was 4.4 percentage points for registered voters and 4.8 points for likely voters.