The race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton continued to show signs of tightening on Wednesday, less than a week before Election Day.
A new IBD tracking poll of national voters found the two major-party presidential nominees tied with 44% support. Clinton had been up in the poll by 5 percentage points.
The RealClearPolitics national average found Clinton up just 1.7 points over Trump in a two-way race, a significantly smaller margin than the 6.5-point lead the former secretary of state had over Trump two weeks ago.
The tightening in national polls also mirrored Trump's apparent surge in several battleground states.
According to the RealClearPolitics average of recent polls, the Republican presidential nominee led Clinton by 1 point in Florida, a state the Trump campaign has identified he must win to garner the 270 electoral votes needed to secure the presidency. The most recent polls suggested that Trump would hold Republican states like Arizona and Georgia, where the Clinton campaign was hoping for upset victories to rack up its Electoral College lead.
A slew of CNN polls released Wednesday showed Clinton with a 2-point lead in Florida and a surprisingly close 4-point lead in Pennsylvania. But she faced a 6-point deficit in Nevada.
The Clinton campaign and its allies also appeared to be doubling back to several other key areas previously thought to be fairly safe blue states.
The Clinton campaign and Priorities USA, a major Democratic super PAC backing Clinton, purchased ads this week in Colorado and Michigan, where ads had been pulled amid the former secretary of state's dominant poll numbers. Though polls leading up to the Democratic primary earlier this year suggested the former secretary of state would easily win the state, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont defeated her in an upset win that gave his campaign a much-needed electoral jolt.
Still, it's unclear whether Trump's late-stage polling advantage represents a significant shift or a momentary fluctuation in the polls.
Matt McDermott, a left-leaning pollster and senior analyst at Whitman Insight Strategies, said Clinton still maintained healthy leads in battleground states such as Virginia, Colorado, and Pennsylvania. Further, McDermott argued that the fundamentals of the race hadn't changed as much as some public polls suggest.
"Structurally, the state of the race is fairly stable," McDermott told Business Insider. "We're sitting at about a 3- to 6-point Clinton national lead, and a nearly insurmountable lead in battleground states to get her over 270 electoral voters. While public polling has been extremely volatile this cycle, internal polling (on both sides) has shown incredible stability in this race."
He added: "There's no evidence to suggest Trump has been successful in overcoming his structural negatives in this race. He remains disliked by nearly three in five voters. Trump's problem continues to be that an overwhelming majority of voters do not see him as qualified for the office he's seeking or think he has the temperament for the job."
Other pollsters also view recent swings in the polls with some skepticism.
YouGov pollsters highlighted a phenomenon called "nonresponse bias," which says that polling participation tends to drop among bad news for a candidate, suggesting that news events such as the FBI announcing it's renewing its investigation into Clinton's private email server may have dampened participation.
And a last-minute surge may not help Trump as much, considering many ballots have already been cast.
According to early-voting totals on Monday, 22 million Americans had already voted. Early voting seemed to suggest that Clinton may have a lead in battleground states such as Nevada, though low black voter turnout in Florida and Ohio has alarmed many Democrats.
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