Mrs Clinton’s lead, which stood at seven percentage points in mid-October, had fallen to less than two points in an aggregate of recent polls. In other words, Mrs Clinton has a clear advantage, but Mr Trump could yet win this.
To get the requisite 270 electoral-college votes, he probably needs to win all the states Mitt Romney won in 2012—including North Carolina, where he has been trailing for most of the past few weeks—plus almost all the battleground states where he looks even competitive.
They include Florida and Ohio, which would be daunting swing states even for a Republican less unsavoury to moderates and unpopular among non-whites than Mr Trump is. Mrs Clinton appears to have an easier path. Merely tallying those states that are safely Democratic gets her to 226 in the electoral college, which leaves her with a wider array of winning combinations.
Thanks to a “firewall” of states where she has enjoyed steady polling leads, such as Colorado and New Hampshire, she could afford to lose Florida, Ohio, North Carolina and Nevada and still win the election. Yet those Democrats who suppose electoral-college arithmetic would save Mrs Clinton if she were to lose the popular vote are setting themselves up for a shock.
As the polls have tightened nationally, so Mr Trump’s must-win states have drifted towards him. In North Carolina, he was three points down at the end of October in an aggregate of polls collected by Real Clear Politics, a website; the state is now a toss-up.
In Florida he has closed a four-point gap over roughly the same time. He has a small lead in Ohio, thanks to its relative sparsity of non-whites and many working-class whites.
Win those three, and Mr Trump need only bag Iowa, where he is also ahead, and perhaps one other state, such as Pennsylvania or Wisconsin. That still looks tough, which is why betting markets gave Mrs Clinton around a 70% chance of victory. Yet a one-in-three chance of the Oval Office getting a Trumpian makeover is hardly a long shot.
Many headline-writers have pinned this shift on the Halloween surprise delivered by the FBI’s director, James Comey, on October 28th. In a letter to Congress, Mr Comey reinvigorated a zombie scandal over Mrs Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server as secretary of state by announcing that, over three months after the FBI concluded that she had done nothing worthy of an indictment, he had in effect launched a new probe into the affair.
A batch of e-mails belonging to a close aide of Mrs Clinton’s, Huma Abedin, had come to his attention; they turned out to have been found on a device belonging to Anthony Weiner, a disgraced former Democratic congressman and Mrs Abedin’s estranged husband. It also turned out that, far from knowing whether the e-mails involved Mrs Clinton or whether they contained classified information, Mr Comey’s investigators had not even obtained permission to examine them. There appeared to be no chance they could do so before the election.
Even some Republicans condemned Mr Comey’s intervention as reckless and unnecessary. They had a point. Mr Comey, a Republican who was appointed by Barack Obama, had been castigated by Republicans after letting Mrs Clinton off first time around, though the decision, he informed colleagues, was not even close (“At the end of the day,” he wrote in an internal memo, “the case itself was not a cliff-hanger.”)
It seems likely that, faced with a certainty of being rubbished all over again if the new e-mail trove had come to light after voting day, he acted to cover his agency. Given how readily voters tend to think the worst of Mrs Clinton, the consequences could matter.
A poll sampled after Mr Comey’s intervention suggests Mr Trump is now much more trusted than she is, which is amazing, given how riddled his stump speeches are with lies. That low opinion of Mrs Clinton perhaps makes it even likelier that Republicans will maintain their control of the Senate, another close contest, which has the potential to doom a Clinton presidency from the outset.
That is because reluctant supporters of Mrs Clinton may now be even likelier to vote for Republicans down-ballot to keep her in check. Yet the polls, it is important to note, were tightening even before Mr Comey’s gambit.
Mrs Clinton’s vote-share has in fact hardly fallen since the scandal. She has around 45% of the vote, which is close to her all-time best. The big change is a flurry of backing for Mr Trump from erstwhile undecided voters and supporters of Gary Johnson, the Libertarian nominee, whose vote-share has fallen by around three points in recent weeks.
This suggests many of his remaining supporters, representing around five percent of the electorate, are disaffected Democrats—a group Mr Johnson’s running-mate, Bill Weld, appeared to be addressing on November 2nd when he described Mrs Clinton as “a person of high moral character, a reliable person, and an honest person”.
A former Republican governor of Massachusetts, running for the Libertarians, who appears to be inviting his supporters to switch to the Democratic nominee: this was an illustration of the trauma Mr Trump has caused America’s political establishment.
On the basis of previous elections (which, admittedly, could mean little in this one) the polls are unlikely to move much before November 8th. There are not many undecided voters left; and pollsters have a habit of herding together towards the end of any campaign, which makes big polling shifts less likely. Perhaps only a big new scandal for Mr Trump—to be sure, a serious possibility—could change things much. That would leave the election to be decided by the parties’ relative success in turning out their supporters to vote.
If the Democrats can get out their more populous coalition of non-whites, college-educated whites and millennials, Mrs Clinton will win.
Her superior campaign organisation will help; the traditionally poor voting-record of non-whites and youngsters will not. The low enthusiasm many feel for her could exacerbate that. Indeed there is already evidence of such reluctance.
Early voting suggests a lead for Mrs Clinton in several battlegrounds, but also points to much lower turnout by black voters than in 2012. That looks ominous for her in North Carolina, where nearly a quarter of the electorate is black. The state could turn out to be her insurance policy, or else her Waterloo.
