Most polls show Clinton narrowly leading Trump on election eve

Saturday, 22 November 2025, 7:28 pm

The 2016 presidential election is just one day away. And if the final round of major national polls is to be believed, Hillary Clinton is holding onto a slight lead over Donald Trump in the race for the White House.

• Clinton +4: An ABC News/Washington Post poll released on Monday showed the Democratic nominee with a 4-point lead (47 percent to 43 percent) over her Republican rival. The survey of 1,763 likely U.S. voters, conducted late last week, has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points, according to the Washington Post.

• Clinton +4: A CBS News survey released on the same day also shows Clinton holding a 4-point advantage (45 percent to 41 percent) over Trump. That poll, conducted Nov. 2-6 among 1,753 U.S. adults, has a margin of error of 3 percentage points, the network said.

• Clinton +4: A Fox News poll, released on Monday, too, again shows Clinton with a 4-point lead (48 percent to 44 percent) over Trump. The Fox survey, conducted Nov. 3-6 among a random national sample of 1,410 registered voters, has a margin of error of 2.5 points.

• Clinton +6: A Monmouth University poll released Monday has Clinton currently ahead of Donald Trump by 6 points (50 percent to 46 percent) among likely voters. The poll, conducted Nov. 3-6 among 802 registered voters, has a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.

• Clinton +3: A separate Bloomberg Politics survey released earlier on Monday showed the former secretary of state with a 3-point lead (46 percent to 43 percent) over the brash real estate mogul. According to Bloomberg, the survey — conducted Nov. 4-6 among 799 likely voters — has a margin of error of 3.5 points.

• Clinton +4: An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released Sunday put Clinton ahead by 4 points (44 percent to 40 percent). The survey of more than 1,200 likely voters was conducted Nov. 3-5 and has a margin of error of 2.7 points.

Each of the polls was conducted after FBI Director James Comey sent his bombshell letter to congressional leaders informing them of newly discovered emails that he thought might be “pertinent” to the bureau’s investigation of Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary. But they were also conducted before Comey’s second letter on Sunday saying a review of those emails did not change his position that Clinton should not face criminal prosecution.

According to the RealClearPolitics average of the latest polling data, Clinton has a 2-point lead nationally over Trump as of Monday morning.

FiveThirtyEight, the website operated by popular polling guru Nate Silver, projects that Clinton will win with a national 3-point edge. And the site currently gives the former secretary a 66 percent chance of winning the election, compared with Trump’s 33 percent.

In 2012, the last batch of national polls in the race between President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney looked like this:
• ABC/WaPo: Obama +3
• Pew: Obama +3
• NBC/WSJ: Obama +1
• CBS/NYT: Obama +1
• CNN: Tie
• Fox News: Tie
• Gallup: Romney +1
Obama wound up beating Romney by 3.9 points (51.1 percent to 47.2 percent) in the popular vote and 332 to 206 in the Electoral College.

While Clinton’s polling lead on the eve of the election looks similar to Obama’s in the most highly regarded surveys, a pair of tracking polls have Trump ahead. An Investor’s Business Daily survey of 1,026 likely voters taken Nov. 3-7 shows Trump with a 2-point lead (within the poll’s 3.1-point margin of error). And the daily Los Angeles Times/USC poll — which has been favorable to Trump and a notable outlier during the campaign — shows the former reality television star leading Clinton by 5 points.

Meanwhile, recent state polls — taken before Comey’s about-face — show a tightening race in several key battlegrounds, including Florida, Ohio, Nevada and North Carolina.
•In Florida, a Quinnipiac poll released Monday shows Clinton with a razor-thin 1-point lead (46 percent to 45 percent) over Trump in the Sunshine State, well within its 3.3-point margin of error.
•In North Carolina, the Quinnipiac survey puts Clinton ahead of Trump by 2 points (47 percent to 45 percent).
•In Ohio, an Emerson College poll shows that Trump has opened up a 7-point lead (46 percent to 39 percent) over Clinton.
•In Nevada, the Emerson poll found Clinton holds a slim 1-point advantage (47 percent to 46 percent) over Trump.
•In New Hampshire, Clinton’s lead over Trump varies from 1 point (45 percent to 44 percent) in the latest Emerson poll to 11 points (49 percent to 38 percent) in one conducted by WMUR and the University of New Hampshire.
But one thing is clear in all of this election-eve polling: Trump and Clinton are two of the most disliked presidential candidates in history.
According to the latest ABC News/Washington Post national poll, 60 percent of likely voters view Trump unfavorably, compared with 56 percent who feel that way about Clinton.
And “the depth of animosity” between each candidate’s supporters is equally unprecedented, ABC News noted: “A nearly unanimous 97 percent of Trump supporters see Clinton unfavorably, 92 percent strongly so. An identical 97 percent of Clinton supporters see Trump unfavorably, 91 percent strongly so.”