Poll Suggests Campaign Has Damaged Trump’s Brand
Clinton's lead continued beyond convention bounce

That golden escalator that Donald Trump rode to announce his Republican presidential campaign doesn’t look so enticing to many voters anymore, a poll released Wednesday suggests.
A majority of voters — 61 percent of them — are now less impressed with the billionaire real estate mogul’s business acumen than when the campaign started with his flashy announcement at the 5th Avenue Trump Tower in June of 2015, a Bloomberg Politics poll showed.
The same poll also found that Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s lead has continued beyond the window that would reflect an expected bounce from last month’s Democratic National Convention.
In a two-way race, Clinton leads Trump 50 to 44 percent nationally, the poll showed. It is the first major national phone survey of likely voters conducted a full week after the Democratic National Convention concluded.
The poll of likely voters has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.6 percentage points.
Other polls conducted in the days after the convention show Clinton has increased her lead in battleground states.
[Polls: Clinton Pulling Ahead in Battleground States]
The Trump campaign, meanwhile, has barreled through a series of unconventional moves that have been widely interpreted as missteps, including Trump’s protracted dispute with the Muslim family of an American soldier killed in the Iraq War. Most recently, and after the poll was conducted, Trump suggested that supporters of the Second Amendment could take action against Clinton if she is elected president, a statement many took as an invitation to violence.