After a month of polling behind his likely Democratic opponent, Republican presumptive nominee Donald Trump has surged past former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a series of recent battleground state polls.
Boosted by terror fears and renewed concerns over the controversial Black Lives Matter movement following the murder of five police officers by a black gunman, Trump now leads Clinton in four key battleground states.
According to a Monmouth poll published on Tuesday, the former television reality star leads Clinton by two points, 44 to 42, in Iowa. A largely white, Midwestern state, Iowa has voted Republican only once in the past 30 years, narrowly favoring George W. Bush in his 2004 re-election bid against John Kerry. With Trump’s appeal to blue collar whites, however, the state could serve as an important bellweather in this election.
Aside from the anxieties over terrorism and what many voters perceive as a worsening racial divide, Trump appears to have benefited from the recent decision not to prosecute Clinton over her use of a private email server to handle classified government documents.
According to an ABC/Washington Post poll published earlier this week, just 35% of Americans approve of the FBI’s decision not to recommend Clinton be indicted for her mishandling of sensitive government materials. Some 56% disapproved, and 57% said her behavior made them concerned about how she would act as president if elected.
In other critical swing-states Trump has also taken the lead. In the all-important state of Florida, which Trump must win if he hopes to defeat Clinton in November, two separate polls gave Trump a five-point lead. A Quinnipiac poll published Wednesday showed Trump leading Clinton 41 to 36, while a JMC Analytics poll published on Monday had the GOP candidate beating Clinton 47 to 42.
But Trump’s largest lead came in Pennsylvania. With 20 electoral votes, Pennsylvania has long been a battleground state, despite eluding Republicans over the past quarter century, with Democrats winning the state in every presidential election since 1992.
The latest Quinnipiac poll, however, shows Trump leading Clinton by a whopping six points, 40 to 34, a massive swing from the agency’s last poll, which had Clinton leading by three points.
And in Ohio, the perennial bellweather state, Trump narrowly led Clinton according to Quinnipiac, 37 to Clinton’s 36, with 7 percent favoring Libertarian party nominee Gary Johnson, and 6 percent choosing Green party leader Jill Stein.
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