We expected that Hillary Clinton would come out of the Democratic National Convention with a modest bounce. Well, that just got confirmed tonight with a release of a poll from one of the most accurate pollsters in the business, Public Policy Polling.
It has Hillary leading Donald Trump by five points in both a two-way race and with Gary Johnson and Jill Stein included. In a two-way race, Hillary cracks the magic 50 percent barrier and leads Trump 50-45. In a four-way race, she leads Trump 48-44, with Johnson getting six percent and Stein two percent.
On paper, there’s not much change from PPP’s poll in June, which showed Hillary leading Trump 48-44 in a two-way race and 45-41 in a four-way race. However, the internals suggest that Hillary’s image has improved considerably while Trump hasn’t done much to improve his image.
Clinton's net favorability improved by 9 points over the last month. She's still not popular, with a -6 net favorability at 45/51, but it's a good deal better than the -15 spread she had at 39/54 a month ago. The gains are particularly attributable to Democrats increasing in their enthusiasm for her, going from giving her a 76/15 rating to an 83/12 one. Trump, on the other hand, is at a -22 net favorability with 36% of voters seeing him favorably to 58% with a negative one. That's barely changed at all from the 35/58 standing we found for him in late June.
Translation: the Democrats are coming home.
PPP also found a lot of other encouraging signs. For one, a generic Democrat would beat a generic Republican 50-43. Additionally, Vladimir Putin is VERY unpopular. He has a 69 percent unfavorability rating, and 35 percent of voters would be less likely to support a candidate who was too cozy with the Kremlin. Additionally, 51 percent of voters don’t think Trump can be trusted with classified information.
What’s even more telling is that this poll ran from July 29 to July 30—before Trump’s sliming of the Khans really took hold.
Bottom line—if Tom Jensen and Dean Debnam say Hillary has cracked the 50 percent barrier, then Hillary has cracked the 50 percent barrier.