SEPTEMBER 6, 2016
Photo: Getty
62 days to go.
For a campaign that seems like it has gone on forever, we are now in the relative home stretch of the 2016 Presidential race. Labor Day has been the traditional start of the serious part of the campaign, and both candidates know it, each of them spending the holiday rallying voters in the key battleground state of Ohio.
This comes as a backdrop to two new national polls released Tuesday that showed the race dramatically tightening. By now it has become clear that Hillary Clinton’s post-convention bounce which showed her leading by double digits nationally is gone. The respected NBC News/Survey Monkey poll (yes, that’s what it’s called) showed Clinton leading Donald Trump now by 6 points (48%-42%).
But shock waves rumbled through the political world Tuesday with the release of the latest CNN/ORC poll of likely voters that showed Trump actually leading Clinton by 2 points (45%-43%).
Before the GOP breaks out the bubbly or the Democrats push the panic button, let’s look at this poll for what it is. There’s been no recent credible poll showing the same results, so this one may simply be an outlier. What we need to see before judging is whether this poll is the first of a pattern — if we soon see 3 or 4 more polls saying the same thing, then we’ll know that have have a dramatic shift in the election on our hands.
There may, however, be some logical explanation for this tightening in the polls. For the ten days or so before Labor Day, Clinton took time off the campaign trail to conduct some always-needed fund-raising, so she was rarely in front of a crowd to answer Trump’s campaign charges against her (and many of his punches landed).
More significant, however, is the fact that Trump’s recent hiring of pollster Kellyanne Conway has made him a more disciplined candidate, believe it or not. (Admittedly, that’s a low low bar.) Gone are the feuds with Gold Star families, praising Saddam Hussein or attacking a judge because he’s a Mexican-American. (The only recent exception was his wildly off-the-rails harangue on immigration in Phoenix last Wednesday night.)
Otherwise, he’s finally attacking Clinton on her vulnerabilities the way a normal nominee would have done months ago. Reportedly at Conway’s urging, Trump has stopped wasting valuable campaign time holding rallies in such deep blue states as Connecticut and Washington State that he’s never going to win but went there to see friends or for some lucrative fundraising opportunities. Monday he was in Ohio (which he desperately needs), and if he really wants to win this thing, he should spend every waking hour in Colorado, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida, all states that he desperately needs to take to win the White House.
For her part, Clinton, who had not given a press conference in 275 days and was beginning to be hurt by accusations that she was ducking the press, held her first “gaggle” (a term used to describe an informal event with the press, this time in the back of her new spiffy plane), and from what I saw in live coverage of the event, she seemed at ease and even appeared to enjoy it. So much so, in fact, that she did it again on Tuesday. Granted a gaggle doesn’t have the formality of a full press conference, but given her ease at handling even the toughest questions about her e-mail server, I have no idea why she waited so long to fix this.
On the down side, her Ohio trip did include a coughing spell that lasted close to 4 minutes while she was addressing a Cleveland rally. Ordinarily, one would feel for the speaker suffering from the cough, but unfortunately it played right into the hands of a whisper campaign that has been engineered by some GOP operatives (with Rudy Giuliani as its spokesman) suggesting that there’s something terribly wrong with Clinton’s health and implicitly asks whether you’d really want to vote for a candidate who’s about to DIE?? The ridiculous rumor was about to collapse under its own weight, but unfortunately Clinton’s coughing spell will probably keep this whispers alive until Election Day.
Clinton had a great wave of press after her convention, and now we’re in a new pro-Trump wave, using his new numbers to call him “The Comeback Kid.” We’re going to have quite a few more of these huge waves, so be sure to take your dramamine if you don’t want to get seasick from all this politics.
