Hillary Clinton has expanded her lead since Sunday's debate against Donald Trump, according to a Reuters/Ipsos tracking poll released Tuesday. Clinton beats Trump by 8 percentage points among likely voters, 45 percent to 37 percent, up from a 5-point lead last week; 18 percent of voters said they would support neither Trump nor Clinton. Trump's lewd hot-mic recording leaked on Friday does not appear to have lowered Trump's already low poll numbers among women, but Clinton is now almost tied with him among evangelical Christians, a group Trump led by 12 points in July. In the new poll, 53 percent of debate watchers said Clinton won while 32 percent picked Trump. (The poll included 2,386 American adults and has a likely voter credibility interval of 3 percentage points.)
An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll before the debate but after the vulgar video found Clinton with an 11-point lead over Trump in a four-way race, but Trump clawed back 2 percentage points after the debate, losing 46 percent to 37 percent Oct. 8-10. Elections are decided by state electors, however, and Trump is running into problems in key swing states, as well as traditionally safe GOP states like Arizona and Utah — a poll of Utah conducted Monday and Tuesday by Y2 Analytics found Trump and Clinton tied in the Beehive State at 26 percent apiece, with third-party conservative Evan McMullin at 22 percent and Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson at 14 percent.
The current polling is "a huge problem for Donald Trump," CNN's John King explained Tuesday night. "A lot of people actually think this means game over." Donald Trump's most committed supporters do not, The New York Times reports, but everyone else can watch King lay out Trump's daunting math below. Peter Weber