Donald Trump is mounting a comeback in the polls - but he still trails entering the closing stretch
Amid the fallout over FBI Director James Comey's bombshell letter to congressional leaders Friday reactivating the investigation into Clinton's private email server, Trump has seen his deficit in the RealClearPolitics polling average shrink to fewer than 3 points nationally.
In the two-way race, that's the tightest the polls have been since early October - before the New York Times' partial release Trump's 1995 tax returns showed he may have avoided paying federal income tax for years, and before a tape emerged of Trump boasting of being able to make sexual advances on women without their consent.
That was also before several women subsequently alleged Trump of making unwanted sexual advances on them, and before two of the presidential debates.
The numbers Monday showed a near-identical race when Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein were factored in, with Clinton leading by 2.8 points. Sunday's 2.6-point lead for Clinton in the four-way average was also the closest it had been since the start of October.
Here's a look:
Clinton held a lead of 1 point in Colorado, 2 points in Pennsylvania, 4 points in Virginia, and 4 points in Wisconsin, (compared with leads of 2, 3, 5, and 5 points, respectively, a week prior). Trump held a lead of 4 points in Florida - the biggest swing compared to last week, when Remington showed a tied race there - a 4-point lead in Nevada, a 2-point lead in North Carolina, and a 5-point lead in Ohio. The swings in the latter three states also represented a slight improvement for Trump.
However, Clinton is polling better in each state in the RealClearPolitics average for each state.
The only national poll to be conducted and published after Friday's FBI revelation came from Politico/Morning Consult. It found Clinton with the same 3-point lead she had before the news broke.
The below chart shows how the litany of October surprises have, somehow, done little to affect the polling done by Morning Consult:
In renowned statistician Nate Silver's "Polls-plus" forecast on the data-journalism outlet FiveThirtyEight, Clinton's chances of winning on November 8 stood at 75.8%, a low point since early October. But the projection has her easily hitting the needed 270 electoral votes to capture the election.
The most recent Business Insider electoral projection, conducted prior to the FBI news, showed the same, with Clinton forecast to capture at least 293 electoral votes compared to Trump's 187. Fifty-eight electoral votes are in the toss-up category.
