Election Update: Polls Show Potential Fallout From Trump Tape

Polls conducted since the disclosure of a tape
on Friday, in which Donald Trump was
recorded condoning unwanted sexual contact
against women, suggest that he has probably
lost further ground against Hillary Clinton.
But the polls aren’t in much agreement, with
some polls showing little change in the race
and others implying that the tape has had
catastrophic consequences for his campaign.
Let’s run through the
nine national polls that
conducted at least some
interviews since the
release of the tape late Friday afternoon. In
some cases, the polls also contain quite a bit
of pre-tape data, so it’s important to pay
careful attention to the dates of each survey.
We’ll start with the polls that didn’t show
much of a shift away from Trump.
Morning Consult’s poll for Politico,
conducted entirely on Saturday, showed
Clinton with a 4-point lead. Technically
speaking, that’s an increase for her,
since Clinton led by 2 points in a poll
they conducted just after the vice
presidential debate. But it’s down from a
6-point lead for Clinton in Morning
Consult’s Sept. 30-Oct. 2 poll. So our
model considers it to be a pretty neutral
result.
The USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times
tracking poll, which has had a strong
Trump-leaning “house effect” , hasn’t
shown a meaningful change, with Trump
remaining about 3 percentage points
ahead of Clinton. Unlike almost every
other poll, the LA Times survey also
didn’t show a bounce for Clinton
following the first presidential debate.
Note, however, that only two of seven
days of the poll were conducted since the
release of the tape.
Survey Monkey’s weekly tracking poll,
also with two of seven days of interviews
since the tape, shows Clinton up 5 points,
little changed from 6 points a week
earlier.
The Google Consumer Surveys weekly
tracking poll, with two of six days of
interviews since the tape, has Clinton up
5 points, unchanged from a week ago.
And The Times-Picayune/Lucid tracking
poll, conducted Friday through Sunday,
has Clinton up by 8 points. That sounds
like a good result for Clinton, but the
survey generally has good numbers for
her, as she’s had leads ranging from 5
points to 12 points in the poll since the
first debate.
Four other polls show clear gains for Clinton,
however:
YouGov’s weekly tracking poll, conducted
Friday and Saturday, has Clinton up by 6
points — improved from a 3-point lead a
week earlier.
The Rasmussen Reports tracking poll
shows a very sharp shift toward Clinton,
putting her ahead by 7 points as
compared with a 1-point lead in the poll
they released on Friday, even though
only one-third of the interviews were
conducted since the tape. That’s
Clinton’s best position in a Rasmussen
poll all cycle.
The UPI/CVOTER International tracking
poll shows Clinton ahead by 6 points — a
marked shift upward from a 1-point lead
for Trump a week ago, even though only
two of seven days of the poll were
conducted since the tape was released.
And, most dramatically, an NBC News/
Wall Street Journal poll , conducted
Saturday and Sunday, shows Clinton with
an 11-point lead (and an even larger 14-
point lead if third-party candidates are
removed). One caution: the poll used a
smaller sample size than NBC News and
the Wall Street Journal typically uses, just
447 likely voters.
What to make of this? Actually, this is pretty
normal. For instance, if the video hurt
Trump by a net of 2 percentage points, you’d
expect some polls to show a 4- or 5-point shift
toward Clinton and others to show no gain,
or even a slight rise for Trump, because of
sampling error and methodological
differences.
I’m inclined to read this data pretty
negatively for Trump, however, for two
reasons. First, as I mentioned, a lot of these
polls still have quite a bit of pre-tape data. So
the potential effects are not yet fully priced
in. Furthermore, the effects of the tape won’t
necessarily become evident overnight. It will
take a few days for more voters to learn
about the contents of the tape and
Republican leaders’ reaction to it. I often see
reporters and analysts jumping the gun based
on the very first poll after a big news event
— but it’s not uncommon to have “false
negatives” in which overnight polls show
little effect while subsequent ones show
more.
And second, Trump couldn’t really afford any
negative shock to his numbers, given that he
entered Friday in a bad position to begin
with. Let’s say that the tape only hurts him
by one percentage point, for instance,
bringing him to a 6-point deficit from a 5-
point deficit a week ago. Even that would be
a pretty big deal. Before, Trump had to make
up five points in five weeks — or one point
per week. Now, he has to make up six points
in four weeks instead (1.5 points per week).
All of this is further complicated by Sunday
night’s debate. Scientific instant polls showed
Clinton winning — although, just perhaps,
Trump could benefit from at least diverting
the headlines away from the tape. Then
again, Trump didn’t exactly avoid the subject
by invoking Bill Clinton’s sexual infidelities,
which could invite further scrutiny of his
own conduct toward women.
For the time being, Clinton is an 84 percent
favorite in FiveThirtyEight’s polls-only
model, and an 81 percent favorite according
to polls-plus (her high point of the year in
polls-plus). But her odds in both forecasts
will probably increase as more post-tape data
comes in. We’ll need until Thursday or
Friday to have a clear sense for the impact of
both the tape and the second debate.