Has Donald Trump Reached His Ceiling In Votes ?

The following article asks, and seeks to answer, an important question -- Has Donald Trump reached his ceiling in possible votes? It was written by Steven Shepard at Politico. Here is part of what he wrote:

Donald Trump has run head-first into an electoral wall.

In poll after poll, Trump isn't even close to winning a majority of the vote. While he’s narrowed the gap between his campaign and Hillary Clinton in recent weeks, in the past 21 national polls conducted using conventional phone or internet methodologies over the last five weeks, Trump’s high-water mark in a head-to-head matchup with Clinton is 44 percent.

And when third-party candidates — Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein — are included, Trump’s highest poll score is only 40 percent, well below Clinton’s high of 50 percent.

The GOP presidential nominee’s limited support isn’t necessarily prohibitive for his chances — especially if Johnson and Stein continue to draw, combined, more than 10 percent of the vote. He only trails Clinton by 4 percentage points in the RealClearPolitics average and by 5 points in the HuffPost Pollster model. But if support for the third-party candidates dwindles closer to Election Day, Trump’s inability to expand his base could tilt the race further toward Clinton or require him to find a way to win with only a plurality of the vote, rather than a majority.

The national polls are striking, even with Trump drawing closer to Clinton in recent weeks. Of the 21 surveys that tested just Trump and Clinton, the Republican failed to break 40 percent four times. In most of the polls — 12 out of 21 — Trump was at either 41 or 42 percent.

Only two polls showed Trump hitting 44 percent: a Bloomberg News phone poll in early August that had Clinton leading by 6 points, and an Economist-YouGov web survey later in the month that showed Clinton ahead by 3 points.

Clinton, meanwhile, earned 50 percent or greater in 6 of the 21 polls.

The numbers aren’t much better for Trump in the four-way matchups with Johnson and Stein. In those 28 polls conducted since the beginning of August, Trump only hit the 40-percent mark four times — three of them automated-phone surveys from Rasmussen Reports, which has a consistent and heavy Republican lean.

Overall, Trump was at 37 percent or under in half of the 28 four-way surveys. Clinton, meanwhile, topped out at 50 percent in a Monmouth University survey last month. But, more recently, she has mostly been in the low-40s in ballot-test questions including Johnson and Stein.

The battleground-state polls also point to a low Trump ceiling. He currently trails in all 11 states that comprise POLITICO’s Battleground States project. And in the 54 polls across those 11 states that make up the polling average, he’s only broken 45 percent three times: He was at 45 percent in Quinnipiac University polls conducted in late July and early August in Florida and Ohio, and he was at 47 percent in a CNN/ORC poll in North Carolina last month.

But even despite those higher numbers, Trump trailed Clinton in all three of those polls, albeit only narrowly. . . .

With nine weeks until Election Day, Trump will have opportunities to reset voters’ perceptions of him — especially with three nationally televised debates on the calendar. But with a ceiling currently between 40 and 44 percent, he’s at a distinct disadvantage against Clinton. And in order to claim a majority of the vote on Election Day, polls indicate he will have to win over voters who right now say they have decided they can’t ever vote for him.

There's a lot more, and if you have the time, I recommend reading it.

(The caricature of Donald Trump above is by DonkeyHotey.)