Bounce: Reuters poll shows Trump in lead for first time

It’s a bump — a small bump, but a bump nonetheless. In the latest iteration of the Reuters/Ipsos tracking poll, Donald Trump took his first lead of the election cycle over Hillary Clinton during and after a sometimes fractious Republican national convention — but only by a 39/37 score, within the margin of error. A large number of voters still remain undecided:

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Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump posted a two-point lead over his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll released on Tuesday, the first time he has been ahead since early May.

Trump’s gains came as he accepted his party’s nomination to the Nov. 8 ballot at the four-day Republican National Convention in Cleveland last week, and as Clinton’s nomination in Philadelphia this week was marred by party divisions and the resignation of a top party official.

The July 22-26 poll found that 39 percent of likely voters supported Trump, 37 percent supported Clinton and 24 percent would vote for neither. The poll had a credibility interval of 4 percentage points, meaning that the two candidates should be considered about even in support.

When filtered down to likely voters, Trump still leads 40.2% to 38.5% for Hillary. This chart (LVs) shows both a bump upward for Trump and a decline for Hillary over the past month in the tracking-poll series:

reuters-ipsos-chart

The shift is doubly interesting considering the source. The Reuters/Ipsos series has given Hillary her biggest leads, and Trump his lowest support levels, of any major media polls. Three weeks ago, Reuters had Hillary up by 11 points, and ten points in the two polls prior to that. The narrowing of the gap in this series seems especially dramatic, given that history.

The Reuters filtering system produces some surprising results in the demos (all LVs). For instance, Hillary only leads Trump by three points among women, 40.1/36.9; less than two weeks ago, that was a 19-point lead at 46.7/27.8.He leads among men 44/36.9, after having (improbably) trailed in that demo for almost the entire month.  Trump has now established a wide lead among white voters, going from 39.9/39.1 ten days ago to 44.3/33.7 now. College graduates still prefer Hillary, but only 40/38 from 53/27.1 twelve days ago. Trump now leads or ties in every income demographic, including those making less than $25K, 41/37. (Oddly, the filter won’t return results for Hispanic voters, saying it has insufficient data.)

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Some of this has the same whiff of an outlier as the earlier Reuters/Ipsos polls, of course, and the overall race is still a virtual tie. But there’s no doubt from the data that Trump got a convention bounce in this polling series, and time will tell whether he can hold it.

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