Eliyohu Mintz

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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.

It’s true that, on balance, Donald Trump’s voters are more enthusiastic about voting this fall.

But it’s also true that the Trump vote is more of an anti-Hillary Clinton vote than overwhelming support for the GOP nominee. A new example this week: Just a bare majority of Trump voters in this week’s NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll said they believe Trump will be a good president. Almost as many, 46 percent, said their feelings were best described by this sentence: “I am not sure whether or not he would be a good president, but he is better than the alternatives.”

Contrast that with Clinton: Seven-in-10 of her voters say she would be a good president. Only 28 percent said they thought she was better than the alternatives.

Those results are in line with other questions that ask explicitly whether voters are choosing to support their favored candidate more as an affirmative vote for that person, or merely as a vote against their opponent. In the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, half of Clinton voters said they were voting more for Clinton, while 44 percent said they were voting more against Trump.

Only 41 percent of Trump voters said they were voting more for Trump. A 51-percent majority said they were voting more against Clinton.

The McClatchy-Marist poll released Friday is good news for Clinton: She leads Trump by 7 points among likely voters in a poll conducted partly after a spate of terrorist attacks roiled the nation and the presidential race.

The poll was conducted September 15-20, placing the Saturday night bombing in Manhattan in the middle of the 5-day field period. And not only does Clinton lead Trump in the poll overall, she also leads on terrorism.

Asked which candidate they trust more to handle the war against terrorism, 52 percent pick Clinton, while only 41 percent choose Trump.

Nine-in-10 Democrats say they trust Clinton more, while only 80 percent of Republicans say they trust Trump more. And even though men tilt toward Trump on this question, 52 percent to 41 percent, Clinton has a huge advantage among female voters: 60 percent to 33 percent.

For months in this space, we’ve examined whether Trump’s “shy voter” theory exists: whether it’s true that Trump will run better on Election Day than the polls indicate because voters don’t want to admit to other people that they are casting their ballots for Trump.

The latest data suggests it’s at least possible: Trump runs better, on net, in polls that don’t use live interviewers than those that do. But his overall vote share isn’t actually higher in those more-favorable polls; Clinton’s is far lower.

Using the HuffPost Pollster chart of the national two-way ballot test, and utilizing the “less smoothing” tool to put more weight on the latest polls compared to older data, Clinton leads by 5 points in the live-interview polls, as of late Friday: 46.1 percent to 41.1 percent. But Trump actually leads on the other surveys that aren’t conducted by live phone interviews by 1.5 points, 40.5 percent to 39 percent.

It’s not clear what’s driving this variance. The non-live-interview polls include automated phone surveys from Rasmussen Reports, and the UPI/CVOTER poll, which has been friendlier to Trump this cycle.

If those polls were actually capturing “shy Trump” voters missed by the live-interview surveys, Trump’s vote share should be larger. It’s not — and while this phenomenon is curious, the cause might become clearer if the polls continue to diverge closer to Election Day.

Trump’s unique candidacy is rejiggering the Electoral College map, and that’s evident in the polls.

HuffPost Pollster’s Ariel Edwards-Levy published a chart on Friday outlining Trump’s relative gains and losses, compared to 2012 results.

He’s currently only 5 points behind in Maine — perhaps a strong enough performance to steal one of the state’s four electoral votes — despite the fact Romney lost Maine by 15 points in 2012, and the 2nd Congressional District by 8.5 points.

Most of the other states where Trump is outperforming Romney by the largest margins come in his geographic base in the Northeast: Connecticut (9 points better than Romney), New York (6 points) and New Jersey (6 points). But those are solidly Democratic states, even with Trump’s better numbers there.

Trump is running much better in two battleground states: Iowa (8) and Nevada (6). He’s now ahead in the polls in Iowa, and tied in Nevada, according to POLITICO’s Battleground States polling average.

There are also states where Trump is running significantly behind Romney — but most of those are still safe Republican states: Utah (-38) and Kansas (-12) top that list, with Texas (-8) and Arizona (-8) coming in next. Clinton’s campaign has done some modest advertising in Arizona, which has only voted Democratic for president once since 1952.

Trump is also a little weaker in Georgia (-5), another traditional Republican state about which Democrats have talked about trying to steal. But he’s also a tick behind Romney in battleground states like North Carolina (-3) and Virginia (-2).

In some states, GOP Senate candidates don’t need to outrun Trump in order to defeat their Democratic opponents — they need to hold Trump’s voters and also capture the sizable third-party vote.

Among the states with competitive Senate races this fall, New Hampshire could feature the highest vote share for the third-party candidates: Gary Johnson and Jill Stein. And those voters could tilt the results of a close race between two popular candidates for Ayotte’s Senate seat.

This week’s Monmouth University poll showed Ayotte leading Democratic Gov. Maggie Hassan by 2 points, 47 percent to 45 percent. That’s despite a large Trump deficit: 9 points, trailing Clinton, 47 percent to 38 percent, with Johnson is at 10 percent.

In the Senate race, Ayotte is winning 88 percent of Trump voters, according to crosstabs provided to POLITICO by Monmouth University pollster Patrick Murray. But she’s also capturing 12 percent of Clinton voters and 57 percent of Johnson voters.

Hassan, on the other hand, is winning 84 percent of Clinton voters — but just 3 percent of Trump voters and 37 percent of Johnson voters.

That’s enough to put Ayotte narrowly over the top. If Trump falls short in many of the same battleground states with close Senate races — states like Florida, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania — GOP Senate candidates will need crossover voters from both the Democratic and Libertarian presidential candidates.


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