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ORC polls: Trump’s national gains extend to Florida, Ohio

Despite the polls, the outcome is utterly unpredictable.

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“If you had told me two years ago that I would be voting for Hillary Clinton, I would have said, ‘No freaking way, ‘” said Michael Sheehan, chief operating officer of a Columbus-based apparel firm.

In poll after poll, at least two-thirds of voters find Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump to be dishonest and untrustworthy.

It’s been about a month since we did so. Clinton’s big lead after the conventions has gone away.

The NBC News/Survey Monkey Weekly Election Tracking Poll found Democratic presidential nominee Clinton with a mere four-point lead on Trump, 48 per cent to 44 per cent.

Meanwhile, on the question of which candidate has the right personality and temperament to be president, large majorities of Americans overall (61-30) and college-educated whites (61-32) pick Clinton, not Trump.

HAMDEN-Voters are feeling pretty negative this election season.

“It’s wonderful how few Trump supporters I’ve run into”, said James King, a partner in a prominent Columbus law firm who backed Romney in 2012 but who likely will vote for Clinton. The HuffPost Pollster aggregate shows Clinton still leading by 2.6 percent after all three results. But few believe either third-party candidate will pull as much support as they’re now getting in the polls on Election Day, potentially adding to Clinton’s total. Both CBS/YouGov and, to a lesser extent, Quinnipiac, estimated that Ohio’s electorate would be considerably more Democratic than Quinnipiac’s. More respondents, 39 percent, said American children would be worse off than their parents than those who said they would be better off, 29 percent.

Nearly the same number of voters said they were not happy that the Republican has not released his tax returns.

These states are known as “swing states”, because the voting there may “swing” the election in the direction of one candidate. Think about the vote on Brexit.

In recent days polls have showed the race tightening after Clinton was sharply criticized for saying that “half” of Trump’s supporters belong in “a basket of deplorables, ” because they are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it”. The bookies got it wrong. No president has won the White House without carrying the battleground Buckeye State since then-incumbent Republican Vice President Richard Nixon was defeated by Democrat John F. Kennedy in 1960. Both Brexit and this presidential election involve raw emotion, populism, anger, nationalism, class division, and other factors that distort accuracy in polling.

Ohio, with its 18 electoral votes, is crucial for Trump and he has campaigned intensively in the state.

This system matters, as the popular vote is less important than the electoral college vote.

Donald Trump at a rally in Iowa.

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Polls only show how people feel at one moment in time. Some of it will come from televised debates later this fall.

Donald Trump profile September 2016