Donald Trump has fallen further behind Hillary Clinton and now trails her by 8 points among likely voters, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll, with 1 in 5 Republicans saying his vulgar comments about groping women disqualify him from the presidency.
The national tracking poll was launched after the Oct. 9 second presidential debate, where Trump was pressed to explain his comments in a 2005 videotape about grabbing women’s genitalia. He described the remarks, which first surfaced on Oct. 7, as “locker room” banter and apologized to Americans.
The poll released on Oct. 11 showed Clinton, the Democratic nominee, had increased her lead over Trump, the Republican nominee, to 8 percentage points on Oct. 10 from 5 points last week.
When asked to pick between the two major-party candidates, 45 percent of likely voters said they supported Clinton while 37 percent supported Trump. Another 18 percent said they would not support either candidate.
Trump was under pressure during the Oct. 9 debate to restore confidence in his struggling campaign after dozens of lawmakers repudiated him over the weekend. He hammered Clinton’s handling of classified information while serving as secretary of state and referred to her as “the devil.” At one point, he said he would jail Clinton if he were president.
The Reuters/Ipsos poll is conducted online in English in all 50 states. The poll of 2,386 American adults included 1,839 people who watched the debates, 1,605 people who were considered likely voters due to their registration status, voting history and stated intention to vote in the election. Among the likely voters, the poll counted 798 Democrats and 586 Republicans.
The poll has a credibility interval, a measure of accuracy, of 2 percentage points for the entire group, 3 points for likely voters and the debate watchers, 4 points for Democrats and 5 points for Republicans.
Meanwhile, Clinton recruited Al Gore, the former vice president in her husband’s administration, to raise the specter of Gore’s loss to former President George W. Bush in the contentious 2000 U.S. election to urge voters to go to the polls next month.
“Take it from me,” Gore told a crowd of several hundred Clinton supporters at a campaign event in a college gymnasium. “Every single vote counts. Every single vote counts.”
As he campaigned for Clinton at Miami Dade College ahead of the Nov. 8 election, Gore reminded voters of the Florida recount saga 16 years ago. Bush was declared the winner in the state by a mere 537 votes after the intervention of the U.S. Supreme Court.
“Your vote really, really, really counts,” Gore said. “You can consider me as an exhibit A of that. For those of you who are younger than 25 you might not remember the election of 2000 and what happened here in Florida. For those of you older than 25, I heard you murmuring just now, but take it from me it was a very close election.”
A chant grew out of the crowd: “You won! You won!”
U.S. President Barack Obama said on Oct. 11 that Trump’s comments about groping women would disqualify him from even a job at a convenience store.
Speaking at a campaign rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, for Clinton, Obama said the choice was clear in the Nov. 8 election even before the tape was leaked last week showing Trump speaking crudely about women.
“Now you find a situation in which the guy says stuff that nobody would find tolerable if they were applying for a job at 7-Eleven,” Obama told the crowd, referring to the convenience store chain.
Obama also criticized some Republicans who have condemned the remarks but are still backing the New York businessman.
“The fact that now you’ve got people saying: ‘We strongly disagree, we really disapprove … but we’re still endorsing him.’ They still think he should be president, that doesn’t make sense to me,” Obama said.