Hillary Clinton now holds a 10-point lead over Donald Trump, 51 percent to 41 percent, according to results from the latest NBC News|SurveyMonkey Weekly Election Tracking poll
Clinton’s double-digit lead is up from an 8-point gap last week. The 10-point margin is the biggest spread in the tracking poll since the two-way general election match-up was first compared in early May.
Clinton also holds a 6-point advantage in a four-way general election match-up at 44 percent, with Trump at 38 percent, Libertarian Gary Johnson at 10 percent and Green Party candidate Jill Stein at 4 percent.
Last week, Clinton’s lead jumped from 1 point to 8 points following her party’s convention, but the real question was whether this bounce would last. The latest tracking poll results indicate that Clinton’s traction over Trump has not slipped.
Over the past four weeks, Trump has lost support from core Republican voters. In previous weeks, the Republican nominee dominated Clinton among men. This week, however, Trump’s margin over Clinton among men is only 5 points, down from a 16-point margin two weeks ago. A large gender gap in American elections is common; although Mitt Romney lost the presidential election in 2012 he still won men by 7 points, according to NBC News Exit Polls.
The gender gap is somewhat expected, but while support among men for Trump has shrunk over the past several weeks, Clinton’s support among women has widened. Clinton has consistently done better than Trump among women and this week her advantage among women is 24 points, up from a 14-point margin two weeks ago.
Trump also regularly has an advantage among white men. Trump has been 23 points ahead of Clinton among white men over the past two weeks, 58 percent to 35 percent. But that support is down from a 31-point margin among white men in Trump’s favor during the week of the Republican National Convention.
Voters without a college degree went from supporting Trump by a 9-point margin in the beginning of July to supporting Clinton by a 4-point margin this week. This is a very large shift. Last week’s results showed voters without a college degree supported Clinton over Trump by 2 points, 47 percent to 45 percent. This week that gap has continued to widen among that group — 48 percent support Clinton and 44 percent support Trump.
White evangelicals are traditionally a very strong voting bloc for Republicans. Trump lost momentum even among that group. He went from a 60-point advantage in early July to a 49-point advantage in the latest results — 71 percent to 22 percent. While an overwhelming majority of white evangelicals still support him, the decline in support among that group is evidence that Trump has lost traction even among the most steadfast Republican demographic groups.
The latest tracking poll results suggest that Trump has slipped considerably with a few key Republican voting blocs. Any comeback in the polls for Trump will certainly require him to win back these important Republican voters.
The NBC News|SurveyMonkey Weekly Election Tracking poll was conducted online August 1 through August 7, 2016 among a national sample of 11,480 adults who say they are registered to vote. Respondents for this non-probability survey were selected from the nearly three million people who take surveys on the SurveyMonkey platform each day. Results have an error estimate of plus or minus 1.2 percentage points. For full results and methodology, click here.