Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
By John Stewart
@DTPaymentNews
The U.S. election is just 24 hours away, but if it were up to the readers of Digital Transactions News, Donald Trump would be the next President of the United States. He’d be bound for the Oval Office, however, with a very weak mandate.
Republican candidate Trump received 41% of the vote in the “Question of the Week” poll that appeared in the newsletter on Oct. 28 and each business day during the week following, compared to 38% for Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate.
Siphoning off a healthy chunk of responses were the other two options in the poll. The third-party option (no candidate specified) received 14% of the vote, while 7% said they simply weren’t going to vote for any candidate for President.
The results indicate a sharp tightening of the presidential race so far as readers are concerned, with Trump losing a big chunk of votes since mid-summer. When Digital Transactions News ran the same poll, with the same options, in late July, Trump attracted a solid 52% of responses, 20 points ahead of Clinton’s tally. That spread is now down to three points.
The third-party option is little changed, having lost two points. But those saying they plan not to vote has soared from a mere 1% in July, indicating that perhaps some who were Trump and third-party supporters this summer have decided to sit out the contest entirely.
At any rate, the survey indicates a national readership significantly less supportive of Clinton than the wider population, at least as that sentiment is expressed in various polls. Meanwhile, Trump attracts nearly as many votes in the reader poll as in the national canvasses. The latest Real Clear Politics average of seven nationwide polls shows 45.1% for Clinton, 42.7% for Trump, and 6.4% combined for the leading third-party candidates, Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson and Green Party standard-bearer Jill Stein.
