Five days ahead of Election Day, Republican nominee Donald Trump’s campaign is clearly on a high, if not dizzy, with new polls in a set of key battleground States indicating that he has either overtaken Hillary Clinton or brought down her hitherto big leads in each of them.
Although 10 battleground States are still deemed to be toss-up States up for grabs because of narrow margins, Trump is now leading in five of them with Clinton leading in four and one tied, according to a RealClearPolitics spread put out on Thursday on the basis of several battleground polls.
The swing States where Trump has advanced significantly in recent days include Ohio (+3.3 per cent), Arizona (+3.0), Nevada (+1.6), Iowa (+1.4) and Florida (+0.7). The States where Clinton leads are Pennsylvania (+4.9), Virginia (+4.7), New Hampshire (+4.7) and Colorado (+1.7). The one State tied right now is North Carolina.
Nationally, Clinton has a lead of 1.7 per cent over Trump in the RCP average of seven polls. A New York Times/CBS News poll put Clinton ahead by 3 per cent and a Washington Post/ABC News poll by 2 per cent, while a poll from Rasmussen Reports put Trump ahead by 3 per cent.
But the relevance of national polls is limited given the fact that the US elections are decided by electoral votes. A candidate needs 270 out of 538 electoral votes to win the White House race.
Clearly, the Electoral College map now looks vastly different from what it used to be week after week over the past couple of months. CNN, which had all but awarded the race to Clinton by pronouncing that she would walk away with well over 300 electoral votes, is now talking of six different scenarios for Trump to get to the coveted 270, even if it still regards his overall path of success as “precarious”.
Clinton’s decline in polls has prompted President Barack Obama to go on a campaign overdrive in select battlegrounds, notably Florida, Ohio and North Carolina and launch a blistering attack on Trump, questioning his credentials and temperament for the top political job at about every venue.
“This is somebody who is uniquely unqualified,” Obama told a gathering of predominantly college students in North Carolina on Wednesday. “The good news is, all of you are uniquely qualified to make sure this guy who is uniquely unqualified does not become President,” he said, making his pitch for Clinton as “probably the most qualified person ever to run for this office”.
Trump, who has been slamming Obama for campaigning “all the time” for Clinton instead of attending to his presidential responsibilities, spoke of FBI’s five ongoing probes into the activities of Clinton Foundation and the country being mired in a constitutional crisis if she got elected.
“Hillary is the one who engaged in a corrupt Pay-For-Play scheme at the State Department -- and now there are five FBI probes into the Clinton Foundation and their pay-for-play activities. Hillary is the one who sent and received classified information on an insecure server, putting the safety of the American people under threat,” Trump charged at his rallies in Florida, amid chants of “lock her up!”