Although national general election polling overall has been generally abysmal for Donald Trump, FBI Director James Comey’s press conference about the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails was about as bad as it could politically get for Clinton, short of an indictment.
Now, we are waiting to see polling taken after the announcement and subsequent House hearing to evaluate if Clinton’s bad news will give the Donald a bump.
CBS News reported on a poll just released by Pew Research on Friday that shows Clinton with a 9-point lead over Trump, but that poll was conducted between June 15th and June 24th.
Rasmussen, a Republican pollster, conducted a poll on the day of the press conference. They showed Trump with a 2-point lead. However, they are also the only pollster to show Trump with any kind of lead in national polling since mid-May when the ABC News/Washington Post poll had Trump up by 2 points.
Here’s the thing: the previous poll Rasmussen conducted on June 28-29 showed Trump holding a 4-point lead, meaning Clinton has gained a point and Trump has dropped a point since then.
Granted we don’t know how many polled by Rasmussen had heard the news about the FBI probe, so we really can’t extrapolate anything from that poll either.
Nevertheless, if Trump’s polling does not see a significant bump after this news, and not just from friendly pollsters, the Trump campaign will have serious cause for concern.
Shane Vander Hart is the online communications manager for American Principles Project, a frequent contributor to TruthInAmericanEducation.com, and the editor of Iowa-based CaffeinatedThoughts.com.
