Five numbers that mattered this week

By Steven Shepard, Politico.com
05/07/16 07:48 AM EDT

Continuing our POLITICO feature, where we dig into the latest polls and loop in other data streams to tell the story of the 2016 campaign. Here are five numbers that mattered this week.

The polls were right all along.

Even as pundits and journalists – including this reporter – questioned the durability of Trump’s lead among Republican voters, Trump remained on top of the GOP field from the time he seized the mantle in early July 2015. And after defying the conventional wisdom and becoming the apparent Republican presidential nominee, some are suggesting there’s peril in underestimating Trump again.

While it’s true that the likely general-election match-up between Trump and Hillary Clinton will narrow from Clinton’s 7-point lead in the HuffPost Pollster average as of Friday afternoon, there’s little doubt that Trump is a decided underdog to win that race. The most recent live-caller poll, from CNN/ORC, gives Clinton a 13-point lead.

How robust is Clinton’s lead? Of the 64 national polls since July 2015 collected by RealClearPolitics, Trump led Clinton in only 6 of them, or about 9 percent of the time. Adding in the three polls that showed them tied, Clinton has led Trump in 81 percent of the public polls.

(More here.)