President Trump would lose the popular vote again if the 2016 presidential election were held again today, according to a new Hill.TV poll.
The survey conducted by Hill.TV and the HarrisX polling company found that 36 percent of respondents said they would vote for Trump, while 44 percent said they would cast their vote for Clinton.
Four percent said they would back Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, while 2 percent said they would vote for the Green Party’s Jill Stein. Three percent named some other person.
Eight percent of respondents said they would not vote in such a hypothetical match-up, while 4 percent declined to state a preference. With those options excluded, the percentage of those who said they would vote for Trump increased to 41 percent, while the percentage of those who said the same for Clinton went up to 50 percent.
In the official government tally, Clinton won 48.2 percent of the vote nationwide. Trump finished with 46.1 percent but was able to claim the presidency by winning the Electoral College.
Clinton campaign chief John Podesta said the poll results suggest dissatisfaction with the results of the 2016 election from a large number of voters.
“In 2016, I think a bunch of Americans thought to themselves “let’s just blow things up and see what happens,’” he said in an email to Hill.TV. “Now that they have actually seen what happens, they wish they could get back to the strong, steady leadership that Hillary has always provided.”
The poll comes less than 50 days out from November’s midterm elections, which are widely expected to be a referendum on the president’s first two years in office.
Trump has stumped for a number of Republican candidates who have sought to align themselves with him, despite the president’s relatively low approval ratings and high disapproval ratings.
“I think that what that poll shows is that neither one of those candidates are even within a couple of points of 50 percent,” Democratic pollster Molly Murphy told Hill.TV’s Joe Concha on “What America’s Thinking” about the American Barometer poll.
“I think that the [44] percent or so that said they supported Hillary Clinton, that’s not enough to get you reelected. I think that that’s people who liked Hillary Clinton who still like her, and still would vote for her again,” she continued.
A Hill.TV survey released earlier this week found that 46 percent of voters surveyed approved of Trump, while 54 percent said they disapproved of him.
The American Barometer was conducted Sept. 14-15 among 1,000 registered voters. The sampling margin of error is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
— Julia Manchester
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