The final Bloomberg Politics national poll, released on Monday, has put Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton three percentage points ahead of Donald Trump, tipping the scales in her favour to win the election. Clinton leads trump 44 percent to 41 percent when all the third-party candidates are included, and has a similar lead without them.
The race so far has been tight, to say the least, with opinion polls initially giving Hillary Clinton the lead. However, as the campaigning progressed and the three presidential debates took place, the lead swung to Trump — and showed a ripple effect as far as the Indian markets.
Now, the balance has swung in favour of Clinton again, leading psephologists to believe that the election will be anything but a landslide. Trump, it may be noted, has already said that he will reject the results of the election if he loses.
J Ann Selzer, who oversaw this Bloomberg Politics national poll conducted by Iowa-based Selzer & Co, was quoted as saying by Bloomberg: "The poll reflects a tight race, for sure, but what is so striking is the sour mood of the electorate. Looking forward, they see scandals aplenty and sizeable segments of each side vow to keep fighting even after all the votes are counted."
The Bloomberg report on the poll said: "The poll of 799 likely voters has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points, higher among subgroups." This could mean that the lead Clinton has in the poll could either double or be entirely cancelled out, depending on which way the electorate swings, and if it swings hard.
However, as of now, the time for swinging seems to be over, with Clinton being given a clean chit by the FBI in the matter of her use of a private server for email — an issue Trump had thought he could capitalise on, and tried to in all three presidential debates, once going so far as to say if he was elected, she would be in jail!
As for Trump himself, the billionaire business tycoon-turned-politician has won himself few supporters ever since tapes, in which he is heard boasting of having molested numerous women, surfaced. The tape has also led to many of his erstwhile big-ticket supporters in the GOP to turn away.
