Bloomberg poll: Trump up 2 in Florida

Resurgence?

American Politics, News | Comments | October 26, 2016

Two weeks to go. We've been hearing ever since the drop of the Billy Bush you-know-what tape that it's all over for Trump. We've been told that even a tightening in the national polls is meaningless because the electoral map is simply too difficult. And maybe it's true. Then again . . .

Donald Trump has a slim advantage in Florida as critical independent voters narrowly break his way in the must-win battleground state, a Bloomberg Politics poll shows.

The Republican presidential nominee has 45 percent to Democrat Hillary Clinton’s 43 percent among likely voters when third-party candidates are included, the poll found. In a hypothetical two-way race, Trump has 46 percent to Clinton’s 45 percent. Among independents, Trump gets 43 percent to Clinton’s 41 percent in a head-to-head contest. When third-party candidates are included, Trump picks up 1 point with independents while Clinton drops to 37 percent, with Libertarian Gary Johnson taking 9 percent and the Green Party’s Jill Stein getting 5 percent. “This race may come down to the independent vote,” said pollster J. Ann Selzer, who oversaw the survey. “Right now, they tilt for Trump. By a narrow margin, they opted for Obama over Romney in 2012.” Trump’s showing in this poll is stronger than in other recent surveys in the state. Clinton had an advantage of 3.1 percentage points in the RealClearPolitics Florida average on Tuesday.

If Trump is leading among independents in Florida, chances are he's making progress with them elsewhere as well. Florida independents aren't that different from their counterparts around the country - except that they don't need snow tires. So if independents are starting to tilt back toward Trump, why would that be? The first things that would come to my mind are Hillary's e-mail lies, Hillary's Clinton Foundation pay-for-play sleaze, Hillary's clear connection to the disruption of Trump campaign events and, of course, the WikiLeaks revelations about her team slamming Christians and worrying that she is not right in the head. The problem there, though, is that the media have so roundly ignored those stories that I question whether many independents have even heard about them. I might point to Trump's much stronger performance in the last debate. But did that many independents even watch the debate as opposed to watching news coverage the following morning, which was totally focused on his "refusal to accept the results" and his use of the term "bad hombres"? Because if they mainly watched the news coverage, they have no idea Trump did well. It might be stunning implosion of ObamaCare, which everyone knows is not going away if Hillary is elected. Or it might just be something a bit more broad - that sense people have that Hillary is, at her core, a vile human being. It's one thing to say you have to hold your nose and vote for her because of this or that. It's another thing as Election Day nears and you're confronted with the prospect of actually doing it. Electing Trump is a huge risk, no doubt. But anyone who's paying attention and isn't a shameless partisan Democrat can see that electing Hillary is a guaranteed disaster. The more you think about it, the better that huge risk starts to look. I've believed all along that if Trump can pull even or slightly ahead nationally, the battleground states will probably follow. I have no idea if Florida is the start of that, or if this one Bloomberg poll is just an outlier. Like I said yesterday, I want to believe.

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