Trump ahead in polls as Democrats meet
What you need to know:
- Mr Trump leads the Democrat Clinton 48 per cent to 45 per cent in a CNN/ORC poll, a six-point gain from the network’s previous survey.
- Democratic Party kicks off its national convention on Tuesday to anoint Mrs Clinton its presidential nominee, as a row over leaked emails showing party leaders sought to undermine campaign rival Bernie Sanders threatened to upstage the gathering.
PHILADELPHIA
Republican Donald Trump has drawn level with and even surpassed his White House rival Hillary Clinton as the billionaire enjoys a surge after his party’s nominating convention last week, polls showed on Monday.
Post-convention bounces are expected for a US presidential candidate who has been in the media spotlight for a solid week.
But the surge is notable in the case of Mr Trump, whose convention was disrupted by floor revolts and other controversies including accusations of plagiarism in a speech delivered by his wife and a snub by the nominee’s former rival Ted Cruz.
Mr Trump leads the Democrat Clinton 48 per cent to 45 per cent in a CNN/ORC poll, a six-point gain from the network’s previous survey.
When the poll included other candidates Mr Trump was at 44 percent, with 39 per cent for Mrs Clinton, followed by Libertarian Gary Johnson at nine percent and Green Party candidate Jill Stein at three per cent. The poll, conducted on Friday to Sunday, has a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.
To date the vast majority of polling has found Mrs Clinton with either a slim or a substantial lead.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party kicks off its national convention on Tuesday to anoint Mrs Clinton its presidential nominee, as a row over leaked emails showing party leaders sought to undermine campaign rival Bernie Sanders threatened to upstage the gathering.
Mr Sanders lost the primary race but he has endorsed his bitter rival.
While the former secretary of state is set to make history as the first female flagbearer of any major American political party, the process has fallen under a cloud that Trump has been all too eager to exploit.
Anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks at the weekend released nearly 20,000 emails from between January 2015 and May 2016, gleaned by hackers who apparently raided the accounts of seven Democratic National Committee leaders.
At least two of the messages showed senior committee members were keen to undermine the Sanders campaign by seeking to raise questions about Sanders’s faith and heritage.
Amid efforts to draw a line under the damage that threatened to revive tensions with Sanders followers, the Democratic Party’s chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz abruptly announced her resignation, effective at the end of the convention.
“The Democrats are in a total meltdown,” Mr Trump taunted on Twitter. “E-mails say the rigged system is alive & well!” (AFP)
Trump has long sought to scoop up disaffected voters who feel Sanders — a self-described democratic socialist initially dismissed as a fringe candidate — was denied a fair shot at the nomination.
SCOOP UP DISAFFECTED VOTERS
After a hard-fought primary campaign, the party had been heading to the convention seeming far more unified than the Republicans, whose fissures were laid bare in Cleveland last week.
Now the Democrats are struggling with the fallout from a scandal that threatened to mushroom into a major crisis just as the party was supposed to coalesce around its nominee.
“The Democrats are in a total meltdown,” Trump taunted on Twitter. “E-mails say the rigged system is alive & well!”
Trump has long sought to scoop up disaffected voters who feel Sanders — a self-described democratic socialist initially dismissed as a fringe candidate — was denied a fair shot at the nomination.
Wasserman Schultz’s announcement came after Sanders on Sunday repeated calls for her to go, with her leadership already under fire and her impartiality called into question by the leaks.
Shortly after she resigned, Sanders said in a statement that Wasserman Schultz “has made the right decision for the future of the Democratic Party.”
He called for new leadership that would “always remain impartial in the presidential nominating process, something which did not occur in the 2016 race.”
Wasserman Schultz said she would still open and close the convention, but the move carries risks, especially if she is booed when she takes the stage.
Despite the swirling political chaos, Sanders made clear he would not make an insurgent bid for the nomination.
