Opinion poll shows Clinton leading in key states

A major opinion poll of thousands of voters in all the 50 American states showed Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton with leads in key states enough to claim victory in the November 8 elections.

The survey was carried out by the Washington Post along with SurveyMonkey and its online polling resources.

The state-by-state numbers were based on responses from more than 74,000 registered voters during the period of August 9 to September 1.

The individual state samples vary in size from about 550 to more than 5,000, allowing greater opportunities than typical surveys to look at different groups within the population and compare them from state to state, The Washington Post said on Tuesday.

For Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, key parts of the party base -- Arizona, Georgia, Texas -- were under threat, the poll suggested, even as he puts pressure on Clinton in states such as Pennsylvania, where she recently enjoyed a nearly double-digit lead, the Guardian reported.

Clinton leads Trump by more than four points in 20 states, including Washington DC, Colorado, North Carolina, Florida, Mississippi plus the District of Columbia, giving her a solid base of 244 electoral college votes, just short of the 270 needed to win, the poll indicated.

Trump leads by more than four points in 20 states, but these add up to only 126 electoral college votes.

The Washington Post poll emerged as Trump broke a losing streak of 40 consecutive national surveys by major pollsters, showing Clinton with a lead in the presidential race.

In a CNN/Orc poll of registered voters published on Tuesday, Trump led Clinton by two points, 45-43, in a race that included the Libertarian and Green Party candidates, Gary Johnson and Jill Stein. The gap was within the poll's margin of error.

As expected, the Clinton-Trump contest has split the electorate along racial lines, the poll noted.

On average, Clinton does 31 points better among non-white voters than whites, and Trump does 31 points better among white voters than non-whites.

Two additional, major polls published Tuesday -- a national poll by Franklin Pierce University/Boston Herald, and a tracking poll by NBC/SurveyMonkey -- showed basically no change in Clinton's lead in the race going back months.

--IANS

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