Hillary Clinton gains 10 points over Donald Trump in first poll after DNC 2016

The first national poll taken since the end of the Democratic National Convention has found Hillary Clinton leaping by 10 percentage points to a 15-point national lead.

The online poll was taken by bipartisan firm RABA Research, which surveyed 956 voters on Friday, the day after Ms Clinton accepted the party’s presidential nomination at the convention in Philadelphia. It found the former Secretary of State polling at 46 per cent among likely voters, with her Republican rival Donald Trump at 31 per cent. Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson was on seven per cent and the Green Party’s Jill Stein on two per cent.

A single poll by a lesser-known polling firm is not, on its own, a reliable indicator of the shape of the presidential race. But it does suggest that Ms Clinton can expect a bounce when a new slew of polls is published next week, and may calm the nerves of Democrats after Mr Trump took a significant lead last week with his own post-convention uptick, when several major national polls put him in front following the Republican confab in Cleveland.

RABA still had Ms Clinton ahead in a poll taken immediately after the Republican convention, but only by five points. “After closing the gap to single digits last week, Trump’s post-convention bounce has disappeared,” said John Del Cecato, a Democratic partner at RABA. “While Trump continues to struggle to consolidate support within his own party, Clinton has a sizable lead among independents, and is even peeling off a small slice of Republican voters.”

A new Reuters/Ipsos poll taken over four days overlapping with the DNC also found Ms Clinton up, with a six-point lead of 41 per cent of likely voters favouring her candidacy compared to Mr Trump’s 36 per cent. Nate Silver, the polling whizz who correctly predicted the result in all 50 US states at the 2012 presidential election, wrote on Twitter that is was “entirely possible that Clinton got a big bounce, but we need more than one poll to confirm it.”

Mr Silver is the editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight.com, which last week sent chills through Democratic circles when its highly regarded election forecasting model suggested that - had the election been held in the days between the two conventions – Mr Trump would have won. The site’s so-called “now-cast” has since swung back slightly in Ms Clinton’s favour, while its authoritative “polls-plus” forecast, which accounts for factors such as economic shifts and historical data, currently gives her a more than 60 per cent chance of winning in November.