Poll: Hillary Clinton gets slight convention boost of her own
Hillary Clinton gets a slight bump across the battleground states coming out of her Democratic convention, answering the bump Trump got last week from his, and it pushes Clinton back into a very narrow lead overall. Clinton now stands at 43 percent support, ahead of Trump's 41 percent. Trump had led 42 percent to 41 percent last week.
Clinton firmed up her Democratic base, but the continued tightness of the race, and the relatively moderate bumps each candidate has gotten, only add to the portrait of a highly partisan election in which most voters' opinions remain fixed. Voters in this study across eleven battleground states had been interviewed previously, and Clinton gained with Democrats who'd been undecided before the convention, plus some other voters who'd been unsure, but virtually no one is vacillating back and forth directly between Trump and Clinton.
Clinton and the Democrats did not entirely find resonance with the mood of the electorate: 40 percent said they liked how the Democrats described the state of things in America today, but 45 percent disliked it, including most independents, many of whom are voting for Donald Trump. Democratic voters, for their part, did strongly like how the convention talked about Bernie Sanders and his supporters, which suggests the rift from the primaries - still visible at times on the convention floor - may have a chance to heal.
Voters said they'd have liked to have heard more about the economy from the Democrats, and most - 54 percent - said they didn't hear enough about changing Washington.
Overall feelings about the Democratic convention were mixed and partisan, but voters were somewhat more likely to say they felt "hopeful" watching the Democratic convention than "pessimistic" or "scared." By comparison to the GOP, 27 percent said Clinton's speech and the Democrats' proceedings scared them, while 36 percent said that of Donald Trump's speech last week.
One-quarter of independents reported feeling more positively about Clinton from the convention, though her actual vote among them was unchanged. And just as Trump was unable to change Democrats' views about him last week, Republicans said their views of Clinton went unchanged or got worse.
This CBS News 2016 Battleground Tracker is a panel study based on 2211 interviews conducted on the internet of registered voters in eleven battleground states (Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin.) Respondents were recontacted July 29-30, 2016 at the conclusion of the Democratic National Convention.
