By Karen Tumulty
and Dan Balz
November 6,
2016
With hours until Election Day, the wildest U.S.
presidential race in memory has grown more competitive in most of the
battleground states, although Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton continues to
hold a broader path to victory than Republican Donald Trump.
The political map suggests that Clinton can
lose several key states long assumed to be in her column and still reach the 270
electoral votes she needs to win.
Trump, meanwhile, has a new reason for
optimism, as a growing number
of states appear potentially within his grasp. But to win, he would
have to take nearly all of them.
The 11th-hour fluidity of the race had the two
campaigns scrambling the travel plans of the candidates and their top
surrogates. In Trump’s case, it is an effort to grab what he considers emerging
opportunities in the sprint for the finish line; in Clinton’s, as insurance
against surprises Tuesday in territory she has considered hers.
Trump said Saturday that he and his running
mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, will hold campaign events in Minnesota,
a state that has not voted for a Republican since 1972. A Trump campaign
official insisted that the move was not a feint and that internal polling
showed the Republican only three points behind Clinton there.
In a sign that Democrats are suddenly anxious
about Michigan,
on Monday, Clinton will be in Grand Rapids and President Obama will campaign in
Ann Arbor. Trump and Pence will also be in Michigan in the next two days.
At a rally Saturday in Tampa, which is a
bellwether of crucial Florida,
Trump said his campaign is moving aggressively to seize upon openings it sees
across the country.
“We’re going into what they used to call
Democrat strongholds where we are now tied or leading,” the billionaire real
estate developer said.
He predicted that he will win Florida and Pennsylvania —
which both voted for Obama in the past two elections — and said that he is
“doing phenomenally well in North Carolina,”
where both candidates have invested significant time and resources over the
past few weeks.
Later Saturday evening, Trump was rushed off
the stage by security officials at a rally in Reno, Nev., as some kind of
disturbance was taking place in the front of the room where he was speaking.
People in the crowd scattered as U.S. Secret Service and uniformed officers
jumped the barricades to apprehend an unidentified man and lead him out of the
room.
Local reports said the man, who identified
himself as Austyn Crites, 33, was released shortly after the incident.
Trump later concluded his rally without further
incident. The Secret Service said in a statement that no weapon was found.
Crites said he was holding “Republicans against Trump” sign when he was tackled
by people around him.
Clinton held a rally in south Florida that was
cut short by rain. She was set to hold an event Saturday night in Philadelphia
that would feature a performance by pop star Katy Perry, whose song “Roar” is
featured in Clinton’s closing ad running in 11 battleground states.
Beyoncé and Jay Z headlined a concert for Clinton on Friday night in
Cleveland.
Also on the line Tuesday is control of the
Senate, where Republicans are defending 24 seats, compared with 10
for the Democrats. Trump’s performance at the top of the ticket could determine
whether Democrats pick up the five seats they need to regain the majority — or
four, if Clinton wins and her vice president, Tim Kaine, has a tiebreaking
vote.
“The tightening of the race in many of these
battleground states is providing a little bit of lift to our Senate races, and
in some of these cases, it is going to be decisive,” said Steven Law, president
of the Senate Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC aligned with Senate
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
“I think we’re really on the razor’s edge,” Law
said of his party’s prospects of holding the Senate. “Trump’s final position in
all of this is uncertain. I don’t think he’s close enough to the pin yet to
lift most of these races into the win column.”
On Thursday, the Cook Political Report
predicted that Democrats will pick up four to six Senate seats, enough to gain
control if Clinton is elected, but less than its earlier forecast of a five- to
seven-seat gain.
Republicans also are bracing to lose seats in
the House, which would diminish the largest majority they have held there since
1928. Neither side, however, expects a wave large enough to restore control to
Democrats, who lost it in the 2010 midterm elections.
Clinton began the final weekend of campaigning
with a narrow lead over Trump in the ongoing Washington Post-ABC News Tracking
Poll. Through Friday night, the rolling survey showed Clinton at
48 percent and Trump at 43 percent, among likely voters. Libertarian
Party nominee Gary Johnson was at 4 percent, and Green Party nominee Jill Stein
was at 2 percent.
That’s the largest margin between the two
major-party candidates this past week — and a sign that Clinton may be starting
to recover from a fresh round of attention to her use of a private email
account and server while she was secretary of state.
Clinton’s decision to ignore a directive that
official business be conducted where possible on a government email account has
dogged her since it became public last year. It reinforced the public’s
long-standing doubts about her honesty and judgment, and sparked an FBI
investigation of whether national security might have been compromised.
A new chapter in that saga opened on Oct. 28,
when FBI Director
James B. Comey informed Congress that new emails, possibly
pertaining to the investigation of Clinton’s private account, had surfaced
during a separate inquiry involving disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner
(D-N.Y.), the estranged husband of Clinton aide Huma Abedin.
Before that development, Clinton appeared in
control of enough states to put her well over the 270 electoral-vote mark. The
tightening of the polls since then has left enough states in doubt this weekend
to force a modification of those earlier predictions.
A quartet of battlegrounds has dominated the
Clinton campaign’s calculation throughout the fall campaign: Florida, North
Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Obama won those four in 2008 and all of them
but North Carolina in 2012.
Until recently, it appeared that Trump needed
to sweep all four to overcome Clinton’s and the Democrats’ electoral-map
advantage. But as the race has tightened, Ohio seems to have moved into the
Republican column, and other states outside those four have potentially come
into play.
The GOP nominee is looking to states including
Michigan, New Hampshire and
Wisconsin to
make up a potential deficit, should he not win Florida, North Carolina and
Pennsylvania.
One force that is factoring into both sides’
assessments is that more Americans are voting before Election Day, either by
mail or in person. Upward of 37 million voters have already cast ballots. In
key states such as Colorado, Florida, Nevada and North Carolina, it is likely
that over half the electorate will have done so before Tuesday.
Those votes have not been counted, but
strategists from both parties are poring over the data about who has voted and
to get a preview of the contours of the 2016 electorate. The figures also give
them a sense of possible trouble spots.
In past years, more Democrats have participated
in early voting.
This year, however, it appears as though Republicans are
closing the early-voting gap in many key states. But it is not clear
whether this reflects greater enthusiasm and better organization on their part,
or just a shift in the behavior of people who would have shown up anyway on
Tuesday.
Polling and early-voting data suggest a number of
electoral cross currents as the race heads into its final two days.
Clinton has struggled to reassemble some
version of the coalition that twice elected Obama, the combination of African
Americans, Hispanics, single women and young voters.
Hispanic turnout appears strong, based on
early-voting data. That is a major reason Democrats think
Nevada will be an easy win for Clinton, although the polls are close
and Trump scheduled a stop there Saturday.
Clinton also has a double-digit advantage among
female voters, who in 2012 accounted for 53 percent of the electorate.
But the Clinton campaign is worried about turnout
among African Americans. The Democratic nominee and her top surrogates have
made repeated visits to major cities in an effort to stoke enthusiasm among
those voters, and she will end her campaign with a big rally in Philadelphia.
“Based on early vote returns, we know that
strong get-out-the-vote efforts in the African American communities in
Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida and North Carolina will be needed to win on
Tuesday,” AFL-CIO political director Michael Podhorzer said.
For Trump, one challenge is a socioeconomic
split in the white vote. He has strong support among white voters without
college degrees, but has seen an erosion in the traditional support for
Republican nominees among white voters with college degrees.
This has been a central dynamic of the
campaign, and Clinton campaign officials view it as a potentially decisive
factor in an electoral map that has shifted since the last election.
The split between college-educated and
non-college-educated white voters has moved states such as Colorado and
Virginia toward the Democrats, while giving Trump more hope of capturing
industrial states in the Midwest such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio, where
there is a higher concentration of non-college-educated voters.
Democrats remain skeptical that Trump, who
boasts of his ability to bring new Republican voters to the polls, can crack
what in recent cycles has been a “blue wall” in the upper Midwest.
“Trump
is making a last bet on white, non-college-educated men in Pennsylvania,
Michigan and Wisconsin,” Podhorzer said. “That’s been tried by Republican
candidates before, and it hasn’t worked.”
Entering the final days of campaigning, Clinton
maintains her advantage over Trump in voters’ perceptions of their
qualifications and readiness to serve as president. By 55 percent to 36
percent, likely voters say she is more qualified, and by 58 percent to 32
percent they say she has a better temperament and personality to serve as
president.
Clinton also is considered the candidate who
better understands “the problems of people like you” and has “the stronger
moral character.” In both cases, her advantage over Trump is in the single
digits.
However, on the question of who is more honest
and trustworthy, voters are more evenly divided, with 44 percent citing
Trump and 40 percent naming Clinton. Perceptions of Clinton’s honesty have
deteriorated in the final 10 days of the campaign, particularly when there was
intense focus on renewed attention to her email problems.
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