 "Hillary Clinton leads Donald Trump by five points in Florida")
Drawing enormous support from the state's non-white voters, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton holds a 5-point edge over her Republican rival Donald Trump in Florida, according to a new poll.
The poll from Monmouth University on Tuesday found Clinton leading Trump among likely voters in the crucial battleground, 46 per cent - 41 per cent. Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein, both of whom will be on Florida's ballot, drew 6 per cent and 1 per cent, respectively, CNN reported.
Monmouth's poll produced another unfavourable finding for Trump: 54 per cent of Florida voters believe the GOP nominee's recent turnabout on President Barack Obama's origins was made for political reasons. Only 24 per cent think Trump believes that Obama is a natural-born citizen.
After years of promoting conspiracy theories regarding the first black President's birthplace, Trump changed course last week.
He still has plenty of work to do on that front in Florida. According to the poll, Clinton leads Trump among Hispanic, black and Asian voters in the state, 69 per cent - 16 per cent. Those three blocs comprise one-third of Florida's electorate.
Clinton's 5-point advantage is wider than other recent polls out of the state, including a CNN/ORC survey released last week that found Trump up by 3, within the poll's 3.5 percentage point margin of error.
More From This Section
But it's smaller than her lead in the previous Monmouth poll in Florida last month, which showed Clinton up by 9. That margin was also larger than other Florida polls conducted at the time.
The latest Monmouth poll was conducted September 16-19 using phone interviews with 400 likely Florida voters. It has a margin of error of 4.9 per cent.