With just a week to go before election day, the race for the presidency is getting tight as Donald Trump has edged ahead of Hillary Clinton by one percentage point, according to the latest ABC News/Washington Post tracking poll.
The Republican presidential candidate is leading with 46 per cent of likely voters, compared to Clinton’s 45 per cent. According to the poll, released Tuesday, the candidates are divided by a slim .7 percentage point margin, well within the survey’s margin of error.
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The poll, conducted between Oct. 27 and Oct. 30, surveyed 1,128 likely voters and had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Trump led Clinton in just one other ABC News/Washington Post poll, which was conducted in May.
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The poll also suggests Trump leads Clinton by eight points when it comes to the share of voters who are “very enthusiastic” about their choice in candidate – 53 per cent for Trump, compared to 45 per cent for Clinton. ABC noted that “strong enthusiasm” for Clinton has dropped by seven points since this survey began tracking voters, with a steady decline over the weekend.
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Clinton’s campaign was rocked Friday — just over a week from Election Day — after FBI Director James Comey alerted Congress that the FBI has obtained new material that may be related to its dormant investigation into whether classified information passed through Clinton’s private email server while she served as secretary of state.
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Clinton has accused the FBI of jumping into the election “with no evidence of any wrongdoing with just days to go.”
A Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll released on Monday showed that Clinton had a five percentage point lead over Trump.
Other polls have also shown Clinton’s lead slipping over the weekend. Real Clear Politics, which averages the results of most major polls, shows that Clinton’s lead has declined from 4.6 points on Friday to 2.5 points on Monday.
However, the latest FiveThirtyEight election outlook shows Clinton with an 85 per cent chance at winning the popular vote and a 75 per cent chance of winning the Electoral College. The polls-only model found that Trump has a 10 per cent chance of winning the seat in the White House while losing the popular vote.
“As an illustration of this, we can compare Clinton’s current margins in our polls-only forecast against President Obama’s performance in 2012,” read the outlook. “Clinton — despite Trump’s recent improvement in the polls — leads by 4.7 percentage points in the national popular vote, a wider margin than Obama’s 3.9-point victory over Mitt Romney in 2012.”
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– With files from Reuters
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