Falling? Clinton’s 12-point lead over Trump has completely evaporated

If we’ve seen anything in national polls, it’s that when Hillary Clinton gets a comfortable lead over Donald Trump, she can’t keep it. Whether it’s novel details about her emails or the Clinton Foundation, her lead over the unpredictable GOP candidate always evaporates — and it’s happened again. New Washington Post/ABC News poll shows that Clinton’s 12-point lead over Trump has all but vanished into skinny air. She now leads him by just one point in a four-candidate race, if you include Libertarian Gary Johnson and Jill Stein of the Green Party; she has a three-point lead over Trump in a head-to-head race. Either way, she’s lost between eight and 11 points, depending on which poll you cite, in a week. That’s a total collapse, right?

The latest ABC News/Washington Post poll tracking Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump shows a narrow gap between the latter, confirming Trump’s comeback in the past week and pointing to the potentially decisive role turnout will play in the election outcome.

The race is 46-45 percent, Clinton-Trump, in the latest results, so close that a tie between independents Gary Johnson and Jill Stein could be significant. Clinton, +1 versus Trump in a four-way mock race, is +3 in the head-to-head — not a significant difference, but suggestive.

About a third of likely voters say they are less likely to support Clinton given FBI Director James Comey’s disclosure Friday that the bureau is examining more emails related to its investigation into Clinton’s operate of a private email server while she was secretary of state. Taking other considerations into account, 63 percent say it doesn’t matter.

Well, not exactly. Maybe in this poll, but there’s no doubt that momentum seems to be moving toward Trump, although not in a way that would be all that unusual—a gain or two at most. We’ll need more polls throughout the week to reach a definitive conclusion. There’s good news in Florida and North Carolina. Trump is in the stout of the race, according to latest Wall Street Journal vote; Fox gives him a four-point lead over Clinton. But Clinton has taken the lead in North Carolina (CBS News has it closer). If Clinton wins North Carolina or Florida, it will be a tiny night. In a abrasive hypothetical scenario, if Trump wins Arizona, Utah, Florida, Nevada, Ohio and an elector in Maine’s congressional district, he would lose. He would have to win Pennsylvania to make up that loss, which is another challenging task.

CBS News elections director Anthony Salvanto broke down the numbers and said Trump still has a tough road ahead to get to 270, as his performance in key GOP states like Texas is uncertain, as he has not fared well with typical sturdy Republican voters. At the same time, there was a sense that he could carry areas where the GOP is not competitive. That is not the case now. But this race was always going to be Clinton’s to lose. If the polls show a precipitous drop in support like the WaPo poll, what will Democrats do so close to Election Day? FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver four options were listedsome of which have already been implemented:

1. A request for more details about the novel email investigation that caused a stir last Friday
2. Mobilize the base by attacking everyone, including FBI Director James Comey
3. Destroy
4. Drop a novel opposition bomb on Trump

Well, the third option is out of the question, given how strongly the Clinton campaign reacted to the news. Perhaps an opposition research bombshell will drop this week, but they it certainly went after Comey…demanding—and their first reaction, besides screams of “holy shit,” was to demand that the FBI provide more details, which they likely couldn’t do because they didn’t review the emails because they needed a warrant to provide a legal framework for conducting a search. The Anthony Weiner investigation, where these Clinton-related emails were found, is unrelated to the investigation into the Clinton email server. The Weiner investigation involves his online interactions with an underage girl; Huma Abedin is said to have provided a laptop that the FBI was reviewing when they came across possible State Department emails. So there was a delay, which ended tonight when the FBI obtained a warrant to analyze the emails on the Abedin-Weiner laptop. It was reported that 650,000 emails were found. As I’ve seen, some pundits have asked on social media, does the Clinton campaign really want full disclosure here? For now, they’re using Comey as a punching bag—and I hope for the best. More polls will be released this week. Let’s see if this decline that is evident in Washington Post poll is becoming a nationwide trend. Remember, a huge portion of voters said the novel email development would not affect their vote.

More information on the polls will be available in the morning.