Anyways, in news actually having to do with American politics:
Trump is currently narrowly edging out Clinton
in a number of national polls.Yes, I know....polls this early, blah blah blah. But people said the same thing when Trump started showing early strength in the GOP primary too.
That said, it'll be interesting to see if Hillary gets any kind of post-convention bump.
Even more interesting is how the introduction of Gary Johnson and Jill Stein affect the numbers.
Currently there's only two recent polls that asked a 4-person race and a 2-person race, and one (CBS News) that did a 3-person and a 2-person.
CBS News:
Trump/Clinton: Trump 44, Clinton 43 (Trump +1)Trump/Clinton/Johnson: Trump 40, Clinton 39, Johnson 12 (Trump +1)Johnson appears to peel votes evenly from both sides (-4% to each).
CNN/ORC:
Trump/Clinton: Trump 48, Clinton 45 (Trump +3)Trump/Clinton/Johnson/Stein: Trump 44, Clinton 39, Johnson 9, Stein 3 (Trump +5)Here, Johnson/Stein appear to peel a bit more from Clinton. Could be that Johnson is still peeling about evenly (4-5% from each), while Stein is peeling entirely from Clinton.
Economist/YouGov:
Trump/Clinton: Clinton 47, Trump 42 (Clinton +5)Trump/Clinton/Johnson/Stein: Clinton 40, Trump 38, Johnson 5, Stein 3 (Clinton +2)Similar effect -- Clinton loses 7 points in the 4-way, while Trump loses only 4. Interesting that the number of Undecided or Other voters actually
increased when the question is opened up to a larger field (goes from 11% to 14%).
Bottom line (and this is an admittedly small sample size) is that Team Clinton has a quandary. Johnson has a bigger effect than Stein, but it's a relatively balanced effect. Stein is siphoning votes pretty much purely from Clinton (which makes sense). Which one is more cost-effective to counter? Or do they ignore both and just try to hammer Trump, even knowing that the more you attack him, the more his core support hardens?