Trump & Hillary Tied

White House Watch: Down to the Wire? Rasmussen, 10/19/16 

Dead even. With nearly one-in-10 voters still looking beyond the top four candidates or undecided and less than three weeks to go until Election Day.

Today’s Rasmussen Reports White House Watch telephone and online survey shows Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump each picking up 42% support among Likely U.S. Voters. Seven percent (7%) still prefer Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, while one percent (1%) opt for Green Party nominee Jill Stein. But three percent (3%) like some other candidate in the race, and six percent (6%) are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Yesterday, it was Clinton 42%, Trump 41%. Clinton edged back into a two-point lead at the beginning of the week after falling behind by two at the end of last week.

Rasmussen Reports updates its White House Watch survey daily Monday through Friday at 8:30 am Eastern based on a three-day rolling average of 1,500 Likely U.S. Voters.

Trump’s performance in the second debate improved his fortunes after the release of a devastating 11-year-old video that showed him making graphic sexual comments about women.

Clinton in turn has been battling revelations from WikiLeaks’ release of hundreds of internal campaign e-mails and is now facing new questions about her handling of classified information while secretary of State.

The two major party candidates have their final debate tonight.  Eighty-four percent (84%) of voters are certain already how they will vote, and among these voters, Clinton and Trump are tied at 47% apiece. Among voters who could still change their minds between now and Election Day, it’s Clinton 35%, Trump 34%, Johnson 27% and Stein with four percent (4%).

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Most voters aren’t buying the story that the Russians are trying to manipulate the election for Trump but think the U.S. media is trying to swing things for Clinton.

Clinton has 80% support among Democrats, while Trump earns 79% of the Republican vote. Trump leads again among voters not affiliated with either major party. Unaffiliateds remain less certain of their vote than

Democratic and GOP voters are.

Trump posts a double-digit lead among men, while Clinton holds a similar lead among women. Women are more likely at this point to be sure of their vote.  The older the voter, the more likely he or she is to support Trump and to be certain of their vote.  Trump is ahead among whites and other minority voters but remains far behind among blacks.  Just 24% of all voters say they’ve changed the way they were going to vote after watching the debates between presidential candidates.

The nature of U.S. involvement in the ongoing war in Syria has been one of the key foreign policy issues this presidential election season, and most voters now favor a no-fly zone in the embattled country despite increasing concern that it may bring the United States into a military confrontation with Russia.

Trump views radical Islamic terrorism as the number one threat to the United States and says Russia would make a good ally in fighting that threat. Republicans and Trump supporters strongly agree that radical Islam is the bigger threat, but Democrats and Clinton voters tend to rate Russia as just as big a danger.

Most voters opposed President Obama's plan to bring 10,000 Syrian refugees to America, saying it was a national security threat risk, but Obama did it anyway, citing humanitarian concerns and the pressures these immigrants were putting on our European allies. Most now oppose his plan to bring even more of those refugees here next year, but Clinton wants to dramatically increase that number.  Additional information from this survey and a full demographic breakdown are available to Platinum Members only.

The survey of 1,500 Likely Voters was conducted on October 16-18, 2016 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 2.5 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/elections/election_2016/white_house_watch_oct19