Strong enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton has ebbed since the renewal of the FBI’s email investigation.
While vote preferences have held essentially steady, she’s now a slim point behind Donald Trump — a first since May — in the latest ABC News/Washington Post tracking poll, produced for ABC by Langer Research Associates.
Forty-six percent of likely voters support Trump in the latest results, with 45 percent for Clinton. Taking it to the decimal for illustrative purposes, a mere .7 of a percentage point divides them. Third-party candidate Gary Johnson has 3 percent, a new low; Jill Stein, 2 percent.
Trump now leads Clinton by 8 points in the share of voters who are very enthusiastic about their choice as of Friday. But, compared to past elections it’s low for both of them –- 53 percent for Trump, 45 percent for Clinton.
Strong enthusiasm for Clinton has lost 7 points since the start of tracking, especially Friday through Sunday. This is possibly an after-effect of the renewed controversy over her use of a private email server while secretary of state. Trump’s strong enthusiasm has held steady in tracking, which started Oct. 20.
The 1-point Clinton-Trump race overall is well within the survey’s margin of sampling error. Combining the last seven nights –- across which results have been very stable –- the results flip to 46-45 percent, Clinton-Trump, with .4 percentage point gap. Again, it is not a significant difference.
Either way, the results are exceedingly close. Trump’s +1 is a noteworthy result; he’s led Clinton numerically just once before, +2 in late May (among registered voters in a two-way test), after he clinched the GOP nomination while Clinton was still in a duel with Bernie Sanders in the Democratic race.
Although the election is close at this point, vote preference results a week out are not necessarily predictive of the final result. Mitt Romney was +1 vs. Barack Obama in comparable tracking poll results in 2012, for example, and John Kerry was +1 vs. George Bush a week out in 2004.
Another look at the data divides the last seven nights of tracking results into red, blue and toss-up states, as designated by the ABC News Political Unit. The results:
• In states considered to be strongly for Trump or leaning toward him (with a total of 180 electoral college votes), he leads Clinton by a broad 60-34 percent.
• In blue states (with 278 electoral votes), Clinton leads 54-37 percent.
• In the five ABC-designated toss-up states (with 80 electoral votes) — Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio and Utah — voters split 41 percent Clinton to 48 percent Trump. That’s not a significant difference given the 5.5-point error margin at this sample size.
