Donald Trump gets debate bounce in new poll but still trails Hillary Clinton

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump appeared to gain a popularity bounce from the second presidential debate, but it wasn't nearly enough to put him ahead of rival Hillary Clinton, according to a new poll.

Clinton holds a nine-point lead over Trump after Sunday's presidential debate, according to a new NBC News / Wall Street Journal poll. But that's down from the 11-point lead she had in a four-way race before the debate and after Trump's lewd comments about groping women emerged on tape.

The numbers indicate that while Clinton still beats Trump by a significant margin the Republican candidate's debate performance earned him a slight recovery — particularly from Republicans.

In a four-way matchup, Clinton now has the support of 46% of likely voters, while Trump has 37%. Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson has 8% and Green Party candidate Jill Stein has 2%.

In a head-to-head race, Clinton beats Trump by 10 points, 50% to 40%. Before the debate she was ahead of him by 14 points.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted after the debate found Trump trailing Clinton by eight points among likely voters, and one out of five Republicans saying that his groping boasts disqualify him for the presidency.

The Reuters poll, however, showed Clinton actually gaining after the debate. An earlier poll just days earlier found her up by only five points.

Among those surveyed in the Reuters poll, 53% said Clinton won the debate while 32% said Trump did.

In the NBC/WSJ poll, before the debate 67% of Republicans said that GOP House and Senate candidates should back Trump, which has now increased to 74% overall.

After a weekend pause, Republicans once again consolidated in support of Trump," said Republican pollster Bill McInturff, whose firm Public Opinion Strategies conducted this survey along with Democratic pollster Peter Hart.

But now all bets could be off as Trump has lashed out at leading Republicans for dropping their support in the wake of his lewd comments.

While Trump's standing in the NBC poll improved slightly after his debate performance, his favourability rating did not. This now stands at 30% positive, 63% negative. That compares to 29% positive and 63% negative before the debate, the poll found.

A series of national polls released on Tuesday (11 October) showed Clinton leading Trump by margins ranging from five to 11 points — except for the USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times tracking poll, which continues to show Trump up by two points.

Immediately after the second presidential debate a CNN/ORC survey of people who had watched found that 57% (to 34%) said that Clinton had won.

The following morning, a survey from Politico and the Morning Consult agreed that Clinton won the second debate, 42% to 28%.

Trump tweeted that "every poll" said he won the second debate. He cited several websites, such as the conservative Breitbart News Network, that simply surveys users drawn to a site's politics, and does not conduct scientific polling.

The NBC/WSJ survey included 500 registered voters on Saturday and Sunday, 8-9 October, and 400 on Monday, 10 October.

The margin of error was plus or minus 4.38 percentage points for weekend polling and 4.9 points for Monday. The margin of error for the full sample of 900 interviews is plus or minus 3.27 percentage points.