Press.
voanews.com
Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump rallied supporters
Tuesday in states they see as crucial in the last week of their campaigns for
the U.S. presidency. Clinton is making stops in three cities in Florida, the
sunny tourist mecca in the southeastern part of the country that Trump concedes
he must win in order to take the White House in next Tuesday's election. A
collection of recent surveys show him with a one-percentage point edge in the
state, but the outcome there remains so uncertain that both candidates are
making multiple visits there in the waning days of the contest.
Trump is visiting two states Tuesday where polls for months have shown
Clinton with consistent advantages, Pennsylvania in the eastern part of the
country and Wisconsin in the Midwest, in hopes of turning them in his favor to
give him a path to the presidency before heading back to Florida on Wednesday.
National surveys continue to show Clinton, a former secretary of state
looking to become the country's first female president, leading Trump, a brash
real estate tycoon making his first run for elected office, by about two to
four percentage points. U.S. presidential elections, however, are not decided
by the national popular vote, but rather by the results from the voting in each
of the 50 states and in Washington, the national capital, with the biggest
states carrying the most weight in the overall outcome.
Based on the state-by-state outcomes, the winning candidate must amass
at least a majority of 270 of the 538 votes in the Electoral College. Despite
Clinton's narrow popular vote edge in political surveys, analysts give her a
decided edge in Electoral College projections, with several showing her already
with 270 or more votes because each state's electors are decided on a
winner-takes-all basis.
If that total materializes, Clinton would need just 28 more Electoral
College votes to become the country's 45th president and replace President
Barack Obama when he leaves office January 20.
Florida as key battleground
That is why Florida, with its 29 electoral votes, is such a key
battleground election state and would be enough for Clinton to claim the presidency
if she wins it and all the states that have voted Democratic since 1992.
Abramowitz predicted that, despite recent polling, Clinton would prevail
in Florida. "The Hispanic vote will be heavily for Hillary Clinton,"
he said. "Trump is going to get clobbered" in that electoral niche.
The analyst said there is "a lot of stability" in U.S. voting
patterns "despite the weirdness of the campaign," where Clinton and
Trump have for months both claimed the other is unfit to become the U.S.
commander in chief and voters hold unfavorable opinions about both of them.
Abramowitz said it is possible that 45 or more of the 50 states could
vote exactly the same as they did in 2012, consistently for either the
Republican or Democratic contender. He said it is possible that Florida and two
Midwestern states, Ohio and Iowa, could flip to Trump after voters favored
Obama, a Democrat, four years ago. Meanwhile, he said that two states, North
Carolina in the mid-Atlantic region and Arizona in the west, that voted for Mitt
Romney, the losing 2012 Republican contender, could end up in the Clinton
column this time.
Trump's need to win Florida, as well as flip states that Obama won in
2012, explains his Tuesday visits to Pennsylvania, where financially struggling
laid-off factory workers might be receptive to his candidacy, and to Wisconsin,
where rural dairy farmers and blue collar workers play an important role in the
voting.
University of Virginia political analyst Geoffrey Skelley said
Pennsylvania has "long been an attractive target for Republicans, but they
haven't been able to win." He said Trump has not led any poll in either
Pennsylvania or Wisconsin since both Republicans and Democrats completed their
presidential nominating contests in July.
Abramowitz said that Trump "is still going to states that look like
longshots. He has a pretty narrow or impossible path to 270" electoral
votes.
Meanwhile, Clinton is headed Wednesday to Arizona, a state where the
growing Hispanic population is opposed to Trump's tough anti-immigration stance
and vow to build a wall along U.S.-Mexican border to thwart more illegal border
crossings by Mexicans and immigrants from Central America.
Arizona has voted for Republican candidates in 15 of the last 16
presidential elections, but Clinton sees an opportunity to claim the state's 11
electoral votes and further dent Trump's chances of winning. Recent polls in
Arizona show her with a narrow edge of less than a percentage point.
Polls inconclusive
One poll Tuesday, by The Washington Post and ABC News, showed Trump
edging ahead of Clinton by a single percentage point in a four-way race with
two fading candidates, Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill
Stein, although both Abramowitz and Skelley discounted it since the same news
organizations' poll recently showed Clinton with a commanding edge.
Last week's announcement by Federal Bureau of Investigation Director
James Comey that he is reopening the investigation into Clinton's handling of
emails while she was the country's top diplomat from 2009 to 2013 has added an
uncertain element into the final days of the campaign.
While the Post-ABC poll showed that Trump supporters are increasingly
enthusiastic about voting for him in the days after the Comey announcement,
other surveys have shown that Comey's decision has had little or no effect on
support for either Clinton or Trump.
Comey ended a lengthy probe of Clinton's handling of national security
material on her private email server in July, declaring that she was
"extremely careless," but that no criminal charges were warranted.
She has repeatedly said she made a mistake in the use of the email server based
in her New York home, but that she did not knowingly send or receive classified
documents in her emails, even though investigators found some were there.
Comey authorized the new probe after thousands of emails possibly linked
to Clinton's State Department tenure were found on the computer of the
estranged husband of a long-time Clinton aide, Huma Abedin. Investigators discovered
the emails on the computer of disgraced congressman Anthony Weiner while
probing accusations that he had sent lewd messages to a 15-year-old girl.
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