Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton polls continue to tilt in favor of the Democratic frontrunner as the GOP’s lead man continues to cause controversy with public statements on abortion and continued support for embattled campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski.
The double whammy of implying that women who get abortions should be punished and then backing a man, who allegedly assaulted a female reporter, is hurting the Trump campaign with women respondents — at least women respondents, who might take part in Trump-Clinton polling.
But will it matter as “the Donald” moves closer to November?
The short answer: no.
While Real Clear Politics currently has Trump down 10.6 percentage points in a theoretical head-to-head with Clinton, there are factors at play that should call some of this data into question.
For starters, RCP consistently finds that Donald Trump does worse against the Democrats (Clinton and Sanders) than his Republican counterparts, who are unable to secure enough votes from within their own party to defeat Trump.
This is a mathematical impossibility and immediately calls into question the polls that RCP is using to bring together their aggregate score between Hillary and Donald.
Furthermore, there are things that these Clinton-Trump polls do not measure, and that is the number of unaffiliated voters and first-time voters, who are utterly disgusted with both parties and see in Donald Trump a true outsider, who can affect change in a way that a tired political figure such as Hillary Clinton never could.
Most of the polls are among probable Republican and Democratic voters, but as the primaries so far have indicated, turnout is much higher than usual with many Independents showing and disgruntled party members going outside their party’s lines.
Plus, polls have thus far been highly inaccurate heading into primaries, so there is no reason to think they’ve suddenly grown laser-precise for the hypothetical general election pairings.
Beyond that, Hillary Clinton is, and always has been, her worst enemy. Throughout her political career, she has flip-flopped as much as, if not more than, Donald Trump, speaking out against gay marriage (before she supported it), and a host of other issues that her Democratic opponent, Bernie Sanders, has taken her to task on .
https://youtu.be/-45rNfw1ItI
Essentially, Trump and Clinton, if they can hold off their opponents, will meet in November — one as a political outsider funding his own campaign and the other as a political insider with a proven track record of taking donations from major corporations for political favor, and both as people who have flip-flopped almost too many times to count.
In those conditions, a no-holds-barred fighter like Donald Trump would be in his element against someone like Clinton, who’s so averse to tough questions that she has gone, in this election cycle, more than 116 days without holding a simple press conference.
Add to that the fact more than 100 FBI agents are now working diligently on an investigation into Clinton’s nefarious top secret email violations — violations two judges have agreed seem to have been in bad faith — and Clinton is hardly the slam-dunk candidate pollsters would like to think she is.
It will be an interesting seven months as both candidates move closer to locking down their respective nominations and then set their sights fully on one another.
While some don’t expect the Republican turnout to be as high if Trump goes against Clinton, don’t be so sure. The GOP’s hatred for all things Obama and Clinton will likely trump any disdain they might feel for a Donald Trump, who wins all 1,237 delegates that he needs to become their candidate.
But what do you think, readers? Are the Clinton-Trump polls to be trusted? Sound off in the comments section.
[Image via Flickr Creative Commons / DonkeyHotey ]