Hillary Clinton, Deborah Ross take tiny NC leads in polling average

Presidential and U.S. Senate polls in North Carolina remain tight this week, but Democrats Hillary Clinton and Deborah Ross now have slight leads over their GOP opponents in the RealClearPolitics polling average.

Last week, the average showed narrow leads for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and incumbent U.S. Sen. Richard Burr.

As of Wednesday, RealClearPolitics has Clinton with a 1.3 percentage point lead over Trump in the average (44 percent for Clinton, 42.7 percent for Trump and 7.1 percent for Libertarian Gary Johnson). Trump led by 0.8 percentage points in North Carolina last week.

Ross has a 0.3 percentage point lead over Burr, a shift from a 1.2 percentage point lead for Burr last week (44 percent for Ross, 43.7 percent for Burr). Ross is leading in the polling average for the first time in the campaign.

In the governor’s race, RealClearPolitics has Democrat Roy Cooper with a 4.1 percentage point lead over Republican Gov. Pat McCrory (48.1 percent for Cooper, 44 percent for McCrory). That’s a slight increase from Cooper’s 3.6 percentage point lead in the average last week.

RealClearPolitics has included several newly released polls in the average, prompting the shifts: SurveyUSA/WRAL-TV, Bloomberg, Quinnipiac and Elon University polls.

This story was originally published October 5, 2016 at 1:31 PM with the headline "Hillary Clinton, Deborah Ross take tiny NC leads in polling average."