President Obama planned to join top Democrats fanned across battleground states on Friday as Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton were set to campaign in the same Iowa [1]city hours apart.
National polls show the presidential election tightening, but Clinton maintains a lead of 4 to 5 percentage points in most recent surveys.
Trump will seek to gain ground in New Hampshire[2], where he trails Clinton but has narrowed the gap in recent weeks, before holding an evening rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He has held a persistent lead in most polls in Iowa, making a Clinton victory there less likely than in any of the other six battleground states where the Democratic nominee has concentrated efforts.
[Trump getting blown out in the Philadelphia suburbs, as Pennsylvania drifts out of reach [3]]
A new Quinnipiac University poll [4]shows Trump and Clinton tied in Iowa at 44 percent.
For the first time, Michelle Obama joined Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail in Winston-Salem, N.C. The two women electrified supporters at the rally, giving a new injection of energy into the campaign with nearly one week left before the election. (Alice Li/The Washington Post)
Clinton has a pair of "women win" early-vote rallies scheduled in Iowa -- in the early Friday afternoon in Cedar Rapids and later in Des Moines.
Trump also planned a stop in Maine[5], where students mostly too young to vote chose him over Clinton in a statewide mock election this week. Earlier this month, Maine Republican Gov. Paul LePage said he agrees with Trump that the national presidential election will be "rigged."
"I am not confident that we are going to have a clean election in Maine," LePage said during an interview with a conservative radio station.
He blamed Maine Democrats for blocking voter ID requirements.
Obama was headlining an early evening rally in Orlando to ask Florida voters to [6]cast their ballots early. The Clinton campaign is encouraging early voting to bank Democratic votes and build what the campaign says could be an insurmountable lead in the battleground state that offers the greatest number of electoral votes.
Democratic vice-presidential candidate Sen. Tim Kaine is also campaigning in Florida on Friday while former President Bill Clinton is in Pennsylvania.
Obama's appearance on Clinton's behalf is part of a tandem effort with first lady Michelle Obama to elect Obama's onetime rival as his successor. Clinton and Michelle Obama campaigned together in North Carolina on Thursday.
His rally in Orlando marks his second visit to Florida this month as he seeks to boost enthusiasm and turnout among Democrats in a key swing state that he carried in the past two presidential elections.
The president will speak at a rally in the Interstate 4 corridor, through the heart of the state, that has been seen as a crucial bellwether in past elections. His trip comes four months after he and Vice President Biden visited Orlando to lay wreaths at a memorial for the victims of a mass shooting at a gay night club.
Clinton holds a slim 1.6 percentage point lead in the RealClearPolitics average of recent polls in Florida, down from an average of 4 points a week ago. Obama is aiming to drive up enthusiasm and turnout among Democrats, especially young voters and minorities. Obama also is expected to weigh in on the Senate race between Democratic challenger Patrick Murphy and Republican incumbent Marco Rubio, a White House foil.
"Th e president is feeling very enthusiastic and optimistic both about Secretary Clinton's campaign, about the campaign of Democrats up and down the ballot all across the country, and about the trajectory of the race," White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters Thursday. "But he's not taking anything for granted. He certainly is going to do everything he can to warn against the perils of complacency."
Obama has been ramping up his activity in the campaign, with multiple trips to swing states each week, recorded phone calls to voters and interviews on television and radio stations. He also has been raising money for Clinton and the Democratic Senate and House candidates.
In the campaign's final week, Obama will be on the road nearly each day, White House officials said, in a final blitz through the most competitive swing states.
Of the tightening polls in Florida, Earnest said: "It's not unusual for there to be some twists and tu rns in the poll numbers, even in the last couple of weeks of an election. That is a state that is historically been the site of intense competition between Democrats and Republicans for statewide offices, and I'm not surprised to hear that that's the case this time, too."
Obama's appearance Friday comes as a new Washington Post-ABC News tracking poll[7] shows Trump has gained on her during the past week, solidifying support among core Republican groups as well as political independents.
[Clinton lead shrinks, even as nearly 6 in 10 expect her to win, Post-ABC tracking poll finds[8]]
Roughly 6 in 10 still expect Clinton to prevail, while the poll finds shrinking concerns about the accuracy of the vote count and voter fraud in the election.
Clinton holds a slight 48-44 percent edge over Trump among likely voters, with Libertarian Gary Johnson at 4 percent and Green Party nominee Jill Stein at 1 percent in the survey completed Sunday through Wednesday. Clinton held a six-point edge in the previous wave and a 12-point edge in the first wave of the tracking poll by ABC News Sunday (50 percent Clinton vs. 38 percent Trump). In a t wo-candidate contest, Clinton holds a five-point edge over Trump, 50 to 45 percent.
Iowa is one of the few battlegrounds states in which Trump has continued to hold narrow leads in most polling in the aftermath of emergence of a 2005 video in which he bragged about his celebrity status empowering him to kiss and grope women.
The demographics of Iowa are favorable to Trump in several ways. It has among the largest shares of white voters in the nation, a sizable rural population and significant number of non-college educated residents, all groups with whom Trump polls relatively well. The state has also endured significant manufacturing job losses, making it more fertile ground for Trump's message than some other battleground states.
Trump raised just $29 million for his presidential campaign committee in the first 19 days of October, about half as much as Clinton, campaign finance reports filed Thursday night showed.
[Clinton doubles Trump's October fundraising and has dominant war chest in race's final days[9]]
Trump had just $16 million on hand as of Oct. 19, compared to Clinton's $62 million. When the cash reserves of their joint fundraising committees are included, Clinton's war chest grew to $153 million, while Trump's totaled $68 million.
The real estate billionaire is nowhere close to personally donating $100 million to his bid as he has claimed he will, an assertion he repeated Thursday at a rally in Toledo. Even though Trump's website and email appeals have been promising to double- or triple-match the donations of his supporters, Trump gave his campaign less than $31,000 in in-kind contributions in the first 19 days of October. That's down from the $2 million in cash he had been contributing each month.
Trump's total personal donations to his campaign now total $56.1 million.
Clinton, who would be the country's first female president, is scheduled to be joined at her first rally a slate of national women's rights leaders, including Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood Action Fund; Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America; and Stephanie Schriock, president of EMILY's List. They are expected to tailor their pitch to women, highlighting the issues at stake in the election, including child care and equal pay, as well as Trump's behavior and history of "demeaning women," an aide said.
With close to a dozen women having come forward to say Trump made unwant ed physical advances over the years, Clinton's campaign has stepped up its targeted outreach to women, including Republicans.
The campaign also announced this week that it had chosen a symbolic venue for Clinton's election night gathering: a convention center in Manhattan with a very large glass ceiling.
Matea Gold and Anu Narayanswamy contributed to this story.
References
- ^ www.washingtonpost.com (www.washingtonpost.com)
- ^ www.washingtonpost.com (www.washingtonpost.com)
- ^ Trump getting blown out in the Philadelphia suburbs, as Pennsylvania drifts out of reach (www.washingtonpost.com)
- ^ Quinnipiac University poll (poll.qu.edu)
- ^ www.washingtonpost.com (www.washingtonpost.com)
- ^ www.washingtonpost.com (www.washingtonpost.com)
- ^ Washington Post-ABC News tracking poll (www.washingtonpost.com)
- ^ Clinton doubles Trump's October fundraising and has dominant war chest in race's final days (www.washingtonpost.com)
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