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Clinton holds narrow leads in five battleground states

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton leads Republican Donald Trump by single digits in five critical battleground states, according to post-debate polls for each battleground.

Clinton tops Trump in Colorado, Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Virginia in Public Policy Polling (PPP) surveys out Thursday.

New polling released on Thursday showed Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are locked in a tight race in South Carolina.

Trump led Clinton by 4 percentage points, 42-38, among likely voters in a Winthrop University survey. The poll had a 4.5 percentage point margin of error for the likely voter sample.

Every scientific poll we’ve encountered so far suggests that voters thought Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump in Monday night’s debate. In fact, some of them showed her winning by a wide margin — wide enough to make it a good bet (though not a guarantee) that she’ll gain in horse-race polls against Trump over the next week or so.

But so far, we’ve seen just two polls released that tested Clinton’s standing against Trump after the debate. They have pretty good news for Clinton, but I’d recommend some caution until we get more data.

In a near unanimity, the media chorus immediately declared it: Hillary Clinton knocked it out of the park. It’s not a surprising assessment. And they aren’t wrong, but they also aren’t the audience that matters.

According to CNN’s David Gergen, anyway you looked at it, Clinton was the clear winner in the first of three presidential debates against Donald Trump. “By all traditional standards of debate, Mrs. Clinton crushed.”

Why Clinton hasn’t put Trump away

My first impression, after watching the opening chapter of the Trump-Clinton debate trilogy Monday, was that really not much would change as a result. Trump had been his rude, sputtering, substance-free self; Clinton had proved herself again to be the diligent studier who pretends to be amused when you know she isn’t.

Polls are able to capture what is often called a “snap shot” of a political race, providing a good assessment of where the contest is at a particular moment in time. But they don’t capture everything, as an illuminating discussion by the analysts at FiveThirtyEight.com reveals:

What Could The Polls Be Missing?

Hypothesis #1: The polls are underestimating Clinton because they don’t factor in her superior ground game.

Most reports (and we’ll have an article with some extensive data on this soon) suggest ... Read More >>

Donald Trump, all day Tuesday, maintained he won a debate that most pundits, and many polls, said he lost.

“Last night was very exciting, and nearly every single poll had us winning against Hillary Clinton, big league,” he said.