For Clinton and Trump, so many battlegrounds, so little time

Inside the margins of error

The Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton campaigns are playing speed chess on the electoral map as they strategize where to deploy the candidates and their surrogates for get-out-the-vote efforts and advertising dollars in the campaign’s final days.

Trump spent another day in Florida, now too close to call. Clinton was in Nevada and Arizona, where a CNN/ORC survey found Trump edging ahead. On Clinton’s behalf, President Barack Obama went to North Carolina to try to drive up Democratic turnout.

In a pitch aimed at African-American voters who are not turning out early for Clinton in the numbers they did for him, Obama said: “If you don’t vote, then you’ve done the work of those who would suppress your vote.”

Clinton seemed to be still be holding off Trump’s pushes for Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, but her margins have dropped out of the comfort zone.

Click on the links for the latest polls from Quinnipiac University, CNN and a compilation of polls from RealClearPolitics.

The take-away: Who shows up?

There’s more than one way to get voters to the polls. If enthusiasm for your candidate isn’t enough, try fear about what could happen if the opponent wins. See Dan Janison’s column for Newsday.

Voting rights and wrongs

White nationalist groups are claiming they are planning to show up at polling places in inner cities as “poll watchers,” heeding Trump’s call to monitor voting in “certain areas” to prevent a “rigged election,” Politico reports.

In Philadelphia, African-American clergy leaders say they are organizing patrols of their own to reassure voters who may fear intimidation efforts, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Location, location....

The Clinton and Trump "victory" parties are planned for just across town in Manhattan on Tuesday night -- Trump at the New York Hilton Midtown, and Clinton at the Jacob K. Javits Center on the West Side. It's a New York conclusion to a national campaign with a partial New York backdrop. 

Campaign got a heads-up

A State Department official appeared to have tipped off Clinton’s nascent presidential campaign in March 2015 about the department’s planned official response to a New York Times story that detailed her use of a private email server, according to emails hacked by WikiLeaks.

A State Department spokesman said the department’s effort to “provide accurate information to the media” about Clinton’s tenure at the agency has “at times required communicating with her representatives to ensure accuracy.”

Trump trumpets Latino backers

Trump, whose base is working-class white voters, sought in multicultural Miami to show the diversity among his supporters.

The crowd at the Bayfront Park Amphitheatre included many Latinos, reports Newsday’s Emily Ngo. Several attendees of Cuban descent said they favor Trump because President Barack Obama’s administration has wrongly sought to normalize relations with the Communist-ruled island.

Obama has issue with Comey

President Barack Obama indicated he thinks FBI Director James Comey made a bad call with the disclosure Friday that the bureau is reviewing new evidence in its probe of Clinton’s email practices.

While saying he wasn’t talking about “the particulars” of the Clinton case, Obama told NowThis: “I do think that there is a norm that, you know, when there are investigations, we don’t operate on innuendo. We don’t operate on incomplete information. We don’t operate on leaks.”

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal details more of the internal intrigues at the FBI and Justice Department over whether and how to probe the Clinton Foundation. And in the Daily Beast, veteran New York journalist Wayne Barrett talks about Rudy Giuliani and ex-FBI man James Kallstrom as part of a "fifth column" inside the bureau pushing the sudden Comey move.

Clinton: Imagine a President Trump

Clinton painted a dire picture, both at home and abroad, of an America in a Donald Trump presidency. In a pitch crafted to fire up supporters and woo undecided voters, Clinton said her GOP rival would create a climate where citizens “fear the future and each other.”

“If you don’t fit into a very narrow category of people he can relate to, somehow you don’t have a part in Trump’s America,” Clinton said at a Las Vegas union hall. See Yancey Roy’s story for Newsday.

Just impeachy

Some Republican members of Congress are suggesting that they would move to impeach Clinton if she becomes president. More investigations also have been promised in what seems to be a play to instill in voters a sense of Clinton scandal fatigue.

Obama hit back on her behalf: “Right now, because a lot of them think that Trump will lose, they’re already promising even more unprecedented dysfunction in Washington, which is pretty hard to do,” he said at the North Carolina rally.

What else is happening

• Newsday’s 2016 Voters Guide is now online, with profiles of every candidate and proposition on Long Island ballots.
• An ABC News-Washington Post poll found voters giving Trump higher ratings than Clinton on honesty and trustworthiness.
• Two past GOP elected officials on Long Island — former state Sen. Michael Balboni of Nassau County and former Greenport Mayor Dave Kapell — are among a group of Republicans statewide who announced support for Clinton Wednesday, Newsday’s Michael Gormley reports.
• Trump campaign CEO Steve Bannon said he will return to running right-wing Breitbart News immediately after the election.
• Huma Abedin, who has been out of sight this week, is still scheduled to appear at a Washington fundraiser for the Clinton campaign Thursday with designer Diane von Furstenberg and Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour.
• Sen. Chuck Schumer told Bloomberg News he lost confidence in Comey over his handling of last Friday’s disclosure in the Clinton email investigation.