Hillary Clinton is essentially tied with Donald Trump in red-tinted Missouri, according to a new poll.
Clinton garners 43 percent support to Trump’s 44 percent among likely Missouri voters in a Monmouth University poll that has a margin of error of 4.9 percent.
While the survey is strikingly bad news for Trump ― Missouri went for the Republican in each of the past four presidential contests ― it’s just one survey. Others show Trump ahead, and HuffPost Pollster tracking shows the conspiracy theorist-in-chief maintaining his advantage in the state.
Still, since midsummer Trump’s terrible poll numbers have made the presidential contest competitive in several states Republicans usually win.
In the Monmouth poll, Clinton leads Trump among black, Hispanic and Asian voters, 78 percent to 13 percent. Trump gets support from 50 percent of white voters, compared to Clinton’s 37 percent. Fifty-three percent of all Missouri voters say Clinton would be better for race relations, compared to 34 percent who preferred Trump. Civil unrest in the wake of the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, helped spark the Black Lives Matter movement, which Trump has condemned.
Republican nominee Mitt Romney comfortably defeated President Barack Obama in Missouri in 2012, but John McCain barely defeated Obama there in 2008.
“The race was a squeaker the last time there was a vacancy in the Oval Office,” Monmouth polling director Patrick Murray said in a press release. “In that respect, this year looks more like 2008 than 2012 when Romney won the state by ten points.”
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.