For the first time this primary season, a mainstream polling service, Rasmussen, on Monday gave Republican contender Donald J. Trump 41% in the national poll, against Hillary R. Clinton’s 39%.
Rasmussen Reports have been criticized since its founding, in 2003, for being a “conservative-leaning polling group.” Renowned pollster Nate Silver, who studied and wrote about the Rasmussen polling methods and results, concluded that they were biased to the right by about 1.5 points, compared with the rest of the mainstream services. Rasmussen polls are more likely to detect new trends in rightwing voter behavior than others, so much so that The Washington Post has reported that Rasmussen’s polls “set off alarm bells inside the Oval Office.”
With that in mind, it should be noted that the Rasmussen results Monday are significantly different from the other recent polls, which all show Clinton with a lead over Trump. According to the RealClearPolitics average of polls, Clinton has a 7.3-point lead over Trump: 47.4% to 40.1%.
Trump leads Clinton 48% to 35% among men but trails her by 44% to 34% among women.
Clinton gets 71% of the black vote, 45% from other minority groups, but only 33% of whites. Trump gets only 9% of blacks, 33% of other minorities and 48% of white voters.
It should be noted that a week ago Rasmussen showed Clinton and Trump tied in the national poll with 38% each. In that poll, 6% said they intend to stay home if Hillary and the Donald are their choices; 16% said they would vote for some other candidate, and 2% were undecided.
According to the latest Rasmussen poll, 15% would like to see some other candidate; 5% are undecided. Also, the latest Rasmussen poll shows that Trump now has the support of 73% of Republicans, while 77% of Democrats back Clinton. But Trump picks up 15% of Democrats, while only 8% of GOP voters prefer Clinton.
Among unaffiliated voters, Trump leads 37% to 31%, but 23% like another candidate. 9% are undecided.
The survey of 1,000 Likely Voters was conducted on April 27-28, 2016 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence.
