October 3, 2016 | No Comments
Hillary Clinton’s lead among likely voters in Virginia has grown slightly since last week’s presidential debate, putting the former secretary of state ahead of Donald Trump by 7 percentage points in the battleground state.
According to the Christopher Newport University poll released Monday, Clinton leads Trump 42 percent to 35 percent in a five-way race that also includes Libertarian Gary Johnson, the Green Party’s Jill Stein and independent conservative candidate Evan McMullin. Of the three alternate candidates, Johnson was the only one to break into double-digits with 12 percent, while McMullin polled at 2 percent and Stein at 1 percent.
Clinton’s lead in this most-recent poll is up by a single point relative to the poll Christopher Newport University released last Monday, just hours before the debate. The former secretary of state was widely perceived to have won the head-to-head matchup with Trump, whose campaign has spent much of the last week attacking a former Miss Universe winner who the Manhattan billionaire called “Miss Piggy” because of her supposed weight gain.
Trump’s surrogates have also worked furiously to spin a bombshell story published Saturday night by the New York Times that included a portion of the real estate mogul’s 1995 tax return, which shows that he took a $916 million loss that year. Such a massive loss could conceivably have allowed him to pay nothing in federal income taxes for an 18-year stretch.
The Christopher Newport University poll was conducted following the first presidential debate, from Sept. 27-30. It surveyed 892 likely Virginian voters via both landlines and cell phones with a margin of error of plus-or-minus 3.7 points.