locked in dead heat with three newly-released polls indicating a tied race, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have begun to slug it out as never before, with she blasting him for “degrading, insulting and assaulting women” and he dubbing her the “most corrupt candidate” to date to seek the American presidency.
As the polls confirmed a clear momentum for Trump in the wake of the new FBI probe of emails that could possibly impact its earlier clean chit to her, Clinton went on the offensive, reviving the sexual misconduct allegations brought up by a dozen women against Trump after the leak of a 2005 tape containing his lewd comments against women.
An ABC News-Washington Post poll released on Wednesday said Clinton and Trump are now tied at 46 per cent each. The other two polls indicating a tie were released by Investors’ Business Daily/TIPP and Rasmussen Reports, with both saying the two candidates were tied at 44 per cent each.
Relishing this unexpected turnaround in polls, Trump kept up his own offensive against Clinton and went on to appeal to people who have already voted for her under the early voting procedure to make use of the facility available in seven States to “correct” their choice and vote for him.
With a decidedly superior ground operation, Clinton has been successful in mobilizing far more people in the early voting drive than Trump. More than 22 million people have already cast their ballots and Trump is now doing his bit to get at least a small percentage of them to alter their vote in his favour.
Much to the chagrin of the Clinton campaign, the FBI on Tuesday released an archive of documents from a long-closed investigation into Bill Clinton’s controversial presidential pardon of a fugitive financier back in 2001. Top Clinton aides, who have already been attacking FBI Director James Comey relentlessly by accusing of him practicing a “blatant double standard”, were taken aback by the release 129 redacted pages of material on Bill Clinton’s pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich, whose wife pledged a $450,000 donation to the Clinton Foundation.
The “odd” release prompted Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon to tweet: “Will FBI be posting docs on Trump’s housing discrimination in ‘70sIJ” The reference was to recent media accounts about a 1973 federal housing discrimination lawsuit against Trump that was subsequently settled.
Hillary Clinton trained her guns on Trump at a Florida rally, saying while she has spent her last 30 years as a public servant, a wife, a mother and a churchgoer, her rival has “spent a lot of time demeaning, degrading, insulting and assaulting women”.
Women constitute a big Clinton constituency and the slew of accusations against Trump is reckoned to have further alienated the women voters as the Democratic nominee kept lambasting him at one rally after another.