Two recent 50-state polls show Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump with a big lead in Kansas but Democrat Hillary Clinton with a significant lead in electoral votes nationwide.

But Trump’s numbers in Kansas are far below what previous GOP candidates have received here, while Clinton’s numbers are about average for a Democrat in the Sunflower State.

The polls were conducted in August by the Washington Post and Morning Consult. Results of each were released this week.

The Washington Post poll said if the election were held today in Kansas, Trump would beat Clinton 49-37 percent, with 14 percent undecided.

But Clinton showed up well ahead of Trump in the battle for electoral votes, 244-126, with 168 electoral votes hanging in tossup states. It takes 270 electoral votes to win.

In the last five presidential elections, Republican candidates have averaged 58 percent of the vote in Kansas while Democrats have averaged 38 percent.

The Post poll was an online survey of 74,886 registered voters in the United States, including 741 registered voters in Kansas. Responses were gathered using the SurveyMonkey polling platform, and responses were weighted to match the demographics of each state. It did not report a margin of error because that is a statistical property that only applies to random sample surveys.

The Post survey also showed widespread dissatisfaction among Kansans for both major candidates, with a vast majority saying they believe the nation’s well-being will be worse in the future no matter which candidate wins. Sixty-six percent said that about a potential Clinton presidency; 57 percent said that about a Trump presidency.

The Morning Consult poll showed much the same pattern, although it estimated that Clinton would get 321 electoral votes if the election were held today, more than enough electoral votes to win the race.

In Kansas, though, it showed Trump has widened his lead since Morning Consult conducted a similar poll in July. Then, Trump led Clinton by 11 points, 46-35 percent. The July poll showed that lead has grown to 18 points, 49-31 percent.

Nationally, the Morning Consult poll showed Clinton’s lead widening in the Electoral College, mainly due to Trump’s support slipping in states like Arizona, which is now considered a tossup, and Ohio, which has shifted from tossup into the Clinton column.

Both polls show that adding third-party candidates into the polling mix changes the numbers somewhat, but doesn’t really affect the trends overall.

The Morning Consult poll included responses from about 18,000 voters nationally. It then used statistical modeling to calculate state-level results from the national data.

In Kansas, both Trump’s and Clinton’s numbers fall 6 or 7 percentage points when the names of Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein are added to the polling question. In that four-way matchup, Johnson shows up at 17 percent while Stein gets about 4 percent.
But political experts note that third-party candidates always show up better in pre-election polls than they do when actual votes are counted on Election Day.

Both Johnson and Stein were their respective party nominees in 2012. Johnson ended up with only 1.7 percent of the vote, and Stein barely registered a blip on the radar screen, getting only 714 ballots total.

Kansas does not officially recognize the Green Party, so Stein’s name will appear on the Kansas ballot as an independent.