Trump narrows gap with Hillary in poll

Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has been successful in narrowing gap with Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton among voters nationwide while heading towards the general election in November, according to a new poll issued Monday.

Clinton leads the New York billionaire, 46 persent to 43 percent, in a test matchup, representing a much tighter margin than her 11-percentage-point lead in April and marking the first time in Wall Street Journal/NBC News polling this year that her support dropped below 50 percent in a contest with Trump, said a WSJ report.

Republicans have rallied behind Trump in the weeks since he effectively clinched his party' s presidential nomination, helping him narrow Clinton' s once double-digit lead to just 3 percentage points, said the report.

In the matchup against Clinton, Republican support for Trump jumped to 86 percent from 72 percent in mid-April. Democrats' support for the former State of Secretary remains largely unchanged, according to the poll.

"Republican voters are consolidating behind Trump. And a more united Republican Party, combined with an electorate looking for major change, has made this a too-close-to-call campaign," said Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster who conducts the Journal/NBC News survey with Democrat Fred Yang.

However, the two likely nominees still suffer from the worst public images in the modern history of U.S. presidential politics, with 58 percent viewing Trump negatively and 54 percent expressing similar sentiments about Clinton, the poll shows.

A remarkable one out of 10 voters say they wouldn' t vote for either Clinton or Trump, a reflection of both candidates' unusually bad public images, said the report, adding that half of voters in the current poll say they wouldn' t consider an independent or third-party candidate.

The poll, conducted among 1,000 registered voters between May 15-19, has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points. Endit