This poll seems to lean quite to the right.

I was hoping just a bad week for Hillary and not some kind of continuing trend. I don't know the background on this tracking poll and would be curious to see what others have to say.

In Europe, far right, racist groups have made gained in recent elections. Why should the U.S. be any different?

whose only function is to harass and intimidate minority and other Democratic voters.

I expected him to wash out in he first wave of (R) rejects, and boldly made that predict with absolute assuredness a year ago.

I've decided not to apply for the prophet intern position at the Office of the Delphic Oracle.

The poll shows a single day increase on the 12th and then just bounces around after that.

That looks like one real bad day for Clinton. It should roll off in a few days.

Last edited Fri Sep 16, 2016, 12:56 PM - Edit history (1)

Beaten here by a very healthy margin of about 30 points in July. I've seen other polls which more recently has her up by very high double-digits, but not 30 pts. That will shrink of course when it's a 3 or 4 person race, but he's got no chance to win California.


The Times is a second-rate newspaper that I stopped reading YEARS ago. It reminds me of the NY Times on the Left Coast.

This is a direct result of the medical issue. Look at the daily data from this poll. Everything changed on 9/12.

The medical issue is now behind Clinton, so hopefully we should see some recovery in the coming days.

You don't know what you're talking about.

It only starts to move after the "deplorables" comment and the medical issue.

Read their methodology. It's laughable.

When you confront people who tout this poll, they go, "Well, it is true that maybe Trump is not ahead, but this poll captures the trends pretty well".

Meanwhile thousands of people are led to believe that Trump is ahead, which is untrue.

As noted it's probably 6% biased towards Trump, so as of today he and Clinton are effectively tied. (44.4% vs 44%)

http://graphics.latimes.com/usc-presidential-poll-dashboard/



It's obvious from the graph that 4 dates/events have seen significant changes:

(A) Trump goes up, Clinton down after RNC.

(B) Clinton goes up, Trump down after DNC.

(C) Something happened on or about Aug 14th to reverse Trump's DNC decline. I'm not currently sure what precipitated this.

(D) Clinton's 9/11 medical episode

It looks like they are going to hurt Hilary by siphoning off votes from her especially among the younger demographic which tends to be heavily Democratic.

Every day they query 700 of them about who they will vote for.

Those 3,000 same people, over and over again. If there are only 100 black or Latino voters in the pool or women over 40, as one example, that's all there will be of those specific voter population. Their impact on the vote will depend upon weighting by the survey company.

If you look at the historical numbers (http://cesrusc.org/election/), the total who say they will vote for one or the other seems to always be in the 85-89% range, so the daily changes don't seem to be largely the result of pulling in undecideds or 3rd party voters. They virtually never crack 90% in total.

I have a hard time understanding why the same voter says they will vote for Trump one day, then Hillary the next, and vice-a-versa, or decide not to vote, perhaps because I don't see a candidate's supporters as being that fickle.

The other thing that seems completely counterintuitive to me is that Hillary had her lowest percentage share in their tracking over the course of the Democratic Convention. The tally on 7/27, 40.3%, was her lowest point between 7/10 and 9/14. Why on earth would a Democratic voter in their group of 3,000 people have had their opinion of HRC decline during the convention?

BTW, in other polls like this, where the pollster wants to keep the selected group willing to reply for an extended period of time, they give them points redeemable for gifts if they participate. The Reuters/Ipsos poll which is similar to this one does that. I did not see a reference to participation carrots on the USC Dornsife info page.

These polls should serve as a wakeup call to the Clinton campaign to change tactics and try to take control of the media cycles.