Political Roundup: Wednesday, November 2

Business Insider: The Race Between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton is Tightening Significantly

Election Day is officially less than one week away, and the race between businessman Donald Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton continues to show signs of tightening.

According to a new IBD tracking poll of national voters, the two presidential candidates are currently tied with 44 percent support. This comes after Clinton had been up in the poll by five points.

The tightening in national polls comes as Trump sees a surge in several battleground states. According to the RealClearPolitics average of recent polls, the Republican presidential nominee led Clinton by one point in Florida—a state that Trump has identified as a must-win to garner the 280 electoral votes needed to secure the presidency. Recent polls also suggest that Trump would hold Republican states like Arizona and Georgia—territories that Clinton was targeting for an upset.

Other polls released today show Clinton with a two-point lead in Florida, and a close four-point lead in Pennsylvania. This comes as Clinton appears to be doubling back to several other key areas previously thought to be fairly safe blue states. Even so, Business Insider reported that it’s still unclear whether Trump’s late-stage polling advantage represents a significant enough of a shift.

“Structurally, the state of the race is fairly stable. We’re sitting at about a three- to six-point Clinton national lead, and a nearly insurmountable lead in battleground states to get her over 270 electoral votes,” said Matt McDermott, a senior analyst at Whitman Insight Strategies, to Business Insider. “While public polling has been extremely volatile this cycle, internal polling (on both sides) has shown incredible stability in this race.”

The Washington Post: After Another Release of Documents, FBI Finds Itself Caught in Partisan Fray

Yesterday, around 1 p.m., a Tweet was sent out from an infrequently used FBI account. It announced that the agency had published 129 pages on its website of internal documents related to a years-old investigation into former president Bill Clinton’s pardon of a fugitive Democratic donor.

According to The Washington Post, the publication of the files related to the Marc Rich pardon inquiry, which agency officials said was posted automatically in response to pending public records requests, came as the Clinton campaign and Democratic lawmakers continued to fume over FBI Director James B. Comey’s decision to announce that he was effectively resuming a review of Hillary Clinton’s email practices less than two weeks away from the election.

All told, these series of events over the past two weeks has now put the FBI, which has long been a highly regarded institution, right in the middle of an incredibly polarizing president race.

“Americans now look at the FBI and see a political entity, not a nonpartisan entity — and that has huge ramifications for the FBI and for all of us,” said Matt Miller, former chief spokesman for the Justice Department and a Clinton supporter, to the Washington Post. “It sows disbelief in our system of government and is hugely toxic.”

The New York Times: Obama Criticizes FBI Director: “We Don’t Operate on Leaks”

President Obama offered his first public comments on the FBI Director James Comey’s recent letter to Congress about new information he says is “pertinent” to the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server in an interview that was published on Wednesday.

While Obama said he makes a “deliberate effort” to ensure it doesn’t appear that he’s meddling in “independent processes,” he suggested that the director deviated from a known norm with the release of the letter.

“I do think that there is a norm that when there are investigations, we don’t operate on innuendo. We don’t operate on incomplete information. We don’t operate on leaks. We operate based on concrete decisions that are made,” Obama said to The New York Times.