Donald Trump leads Hillary Clinton for the first time ever, in a poll taken after his Republican National Convention.
The national poll by Morning Consult finds the Republican presidential nominee pulling ahead of Clinton by 4 points, which Morning Consult finds a “sizeable swing” from the past week, when Clinton clung to a 2 point lead. The company found Trump on an uptick since the Department of Justice decided there was not enough evidence to prosecute Clinton for her use of a private email server as Secretary of State.
That increase is less than the traditional post-convention bounce: Since 1964, almost every major presidential candidate has gotten a bounce in the Gallup Poll after his convention, with the average gain 6 percentage points. A CNN poll, however, found Trump leading Clinton, post-convention, by three points by 48 percent to 45 percent. That represents a 6-point convention bounce for Trump. He also led Clinton 44 percent to 39 percent in a four-way matchup that included Gary Johnson at 9 percent and Jill Stein at 3 percent.
The Democratic National Convention opens today, amid turmoil over the resignation of Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz over leaked emails that showed DNC staffers favoring Clinton over rival Bernie Sanders.
Much of Trump’s lift can be attributed to a consolidation among Republicans, Morning Consult said. In the new poll, 85 percent of Republicans said they would vote for Trump, compared to 79 percent from the week before. The convention itself may have played a role: more than half of voters -- 53 percent -- said they listened to a lot or some of the convention.
Almost half -- 48 percent -- rated Trump's speech as good or excellent, essentially tied with the speech given by his daughter, Ivanka Trump, but higher than his running mate, Mike Pence, or Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus.