To the growing discomfiture of Donald Trump, his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton is not only holding on to a fairly healthy national lead, but is well ahead in some of the key battleground States that will ultimately decide the US presidential race.
A newly-released NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll projects a 5 per cent lead for Clinton in Florida, 9 per cent in North Carolina, 13 per cent in Virginia and 14 per cent in Colorado.
“These are supposed to be battleground states, but right now, they don’t look that way,” said lee Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion, noting if Clinton does walk away with these four States, Trump will have “no realistic path to getting 270 electoral votes needed for victory”.
Even if Trump manages to win Florida and its 29 electoral votes, he would have to run the table in the other battlegrounds, including Pennsylvania, he said.
Over the last weekend, the same poll had projected leads for Clinton in three other battlegrounds as well – 11 per cent in Pennsylvania, 5 per cent in Ohio and 4 per cent in Iowa.
Some other recent polls may have been a little less daunting for Trump, but the Republican is still trailing Clinton in these key swing States at this point, albeit within the margin of error in some of them. A Real Politics Average of recent polls shows Clinton ahead by 9.2 per cent in Pennsylvania, by 8 per cent in Virginia, by 3.3 per cent in Florida, by 2.6 per cent in Ohio, by 2 per cent in North Carolina and by 0.4 per cent in Ohio.
Nationally, Clinton leads Trump by 6.8 per cent (47.8 to 41) in the RCP average, with some of the recent polls suggesting a slight tightening of the race when compared to that a week ago. Two of the latest polls from Bloomberg and Reuters put Clinton ahead by 6 per cent, while NBC News had her up by last week by 10 per cent and ABC News by 8 per cent.
The encouraging polls notwithstanding, Clinton is going all out to keep up the pressure on Trump. On Friday, she released her 2015 tax returns, taunting her opponent to fall in line, despite his refusal to do on the grounds that his returns are continuing to be under audit by the Internal Revenue Service.
Clinton’s tax returns show that she and her husband Bill Clinton together earned a whopping $10.7 million last year, paid $3.6 million in federal taxes and gave $1.4 million to charity. According to media accounts, the Clintons’ income puts them well within the ranks of the top 0.1 per cent of Americans.
The bulk of the income that the Clintons made came from speaking fees for appearances made largely Hillary Clinton launched her presidential campaign in April 2015. It included addresses to big Wall Street corporations – a point that was brought up repeatedly by Clinton’s Democratic rival Bernie Sanders during the party primaries.
“Donald Trump is hiding behind fake excuses and backtracking on his previous promises to release his tax returns…What is he trying to hideIJ” asked Clinton’s Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri. In contrast, the Clintons’ tax returns for the last four decades are now said to be out in the public domain.
Without addressing that specific issue, the Trump campaign dubbed Clinton’s release of tax documents as “nothing more than an attempt at distraction of misdirection by an individual who crated and then purged an illegal private email server”. What the American public wants to see are “the 33,000 emails she deleted to obstruct an FBI investigation”, Trump Campaign’s Senior Communications Director Jason Miller said.