Here are some poll results to brighten your morning:
A new Franklin & Marshall College poll suggests that Pennsylvania is slipping from Republican Donald Trump’s grasp in the last week of the presidential campaign, with Democrat Hillary Clinton opening up an 11-point lead among likely voters.
Clinton has the support of 49 percent of those who say they are certain to vote, to 38 percent for Trump, according to the survey released Tuesday. The remainder were undecided or planning to support a third-party candidate.
“This state was always going to be an uphill fight for Trump to win,” said F&M polling director G. Terry Madonna. “Pennsylvania is simply trending more Democratic than the other big swing states.”
In Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate race, the poll finds Democrat Katie McGinty with a 47 percent to 35 percent lead over Republican incumbent Sen. Pat Toomey among likely voters. Her 12-point advantage is larger than in previous F&M polls and also bigger than the average of recent Senate race polls in the state.
On the one hand, this is about where I expected the presidential race to end up in Pennsylvania. On the other hand, it’s still an outlier among polls, and it’s very optimistic about the Senate race. I said that McGinty would win as soon as Trump won the nomination, but I always expected Toomey to outperform Trump by a wide margin. These polls have the reverse happening, and I just don’t see why that would be the case. She hasn’t been a bad candidate, but she hasn’t been spectacular, either. And there are a lot of Republicans in the suburbs who have little problem with Toomey but have huge problems with The Donald.
On the other hand, Toomey’s refusal to say whether or not he’s voting for Trump may be backfiring. It could be that a lot more Trump voters are not going to support him than moderates are going to split their tickets.
Either way, these numbers look very good, and it doesn’t really matter how much Clinton and McGinty win by so long as they win.
Plus, in my experience, G. Terry Madonna and the Franklin & Marshall College poll are usually pretty accurate.
