What They Told Us: Reviewing Last Week’s Key Polls - Week Ending November 4, 2017

Americans will change their clocks back an hour tonight, and two days later voters in New Jersey and Virginia will change their governors.

In New Jersey, it looks like a runaway for Democrat Phil Murphy who holds a 15-point lead over Republican Kim Guadagno.

But Virginia is shaping up as a nail-biter, with Republican Ed Gillespie and Democrat Ralph Northam running dead even.

A sizable number of voters in both states say they’re more likely to vote in the governor’s race because Donald Trump’s in the White House. Trump’s approval ratings held steady in October, and his daily job approval remains in the low to mid-40s.

Several Republican senators have been openly critical of the president in recent days. But 61% of Republican voters say their own views are closer to Trump’s, while just 26% say they identify more with the average GOP member of Congress.

A plurality (45%) of all voters thinks Trump governs more like a third-party president than a Republican.

Following Tuesday’s terror attack in New York City, most voters share the president’s belief that tougher vetting is needed for those who enter this country.

Forty-nine percent (49%) favor Trump’s temporary ban on entry to the United States of people from Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, North Korea and Venezuela until the federal government improves its ability to screen out potential terrorists. Thirty-nine percent (39%) oppose such a ban, while 12% are undecided.

Special counsel Robert Mueller has issued the first indictments in his probe of Russian influence on last year’s elections, but voters say they are not likely to prove a problem for the president.

Will Mueller expand his probe? The latest Rasmussen Minute asks: Did Hillary Clinton give 20% of U.S. uranium to Russia in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation?

Fifty-one percent (51%) of voters believe it’s likely that Bill and Hillary Clinton or their close political associates broke the law in their dealings with Russia.

Former Democratic National Committee chairman Donna Brazile says in a new book that Hillary Clinton gamed the party apparatus to defeat primary challenger Bernie Sanders. Democratic voters were already unhappy with the party’s superdelegate system during last year’s presidential primaries.

In other surveys last week:

-- Thirty-two percent (32%) of voters say the country is headed in the right direction.

-- Religion is still an important part of most Americans’ lives, even if they don’t visit a house of worship regularly.

-- Americans aren’t taking any chances on flu season this year.

-- Thousands of previously undisclosed documents about the Kennedy assassination have just been made public. Most Americans still aren’t convinced that President John F. Kennedy was the victim of a lone assassin in November 1963.

-- Call it a candy hangover. A whole lot of us have leftover Halloween candy in our near future.

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