Republican Donald Trump is gaining ground in several battleground states with Election Day only 13 days away.
Several new polls show Democrat Hillary Clinton still ahead nationally, but not as strongly as she was in recent weeks.
And a recent Bloomberg poll in Florida shows Trump with a 2-point advantage in the crucial swing state.
Other polls in the state show Clinton up 3 or 4 points — or the candidates tied.
The Real Clear Politics average of state polls show Clinton up just 1.6 percent in Florida, down from 4 points on Oct.21. She also leads in the battlegrounds of Pennsylvania (4.4), North Carolina (2), Nevada (3.6) and Arizona (1.5). But Trump leads in Ohio (1.1) and Iowa (3.7).
Republicans have never won the presidency without carrying Ohio.
Trump is trending upward in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Nevada, while Clinton's numbers are improving in North Carolina and Arizona.
Trump and his supporters argue that his poll numbers are actually even higher than polls are showing — partly due to what they believe to be bias in the polls and partly because they say some Trump voters are not admitting their allegiance when pollsters ask because of negative perceptions of him in the media.
And Republicans released a memo on Wednesday saying they are doing better in earlier voting this year than Democrats, who have traditionally held the advantage.
USA Today and ABC News surveys released Wednesday each show Clinton ahead 9 points nationally, Reuters/Ipsos shows her ahead by 4, and Fox News has her ahead only 3 (up 2 from last month.) The CNN Poll of Polls, which, like RCP, averages several recent polls, shows Clinton holding onto her national lead.
But the presidential race is not a national popular vote, and, as Democrat Al Gore found out in 2000, winning the most votes nationwide is no guarantee of earning the desk in the Oval Office. Trump's camp is counting on a continued surge in battleground states as he held several events in Florida on Tuesday and one in North Carolina — where he trails — on Wednesday, addressing issues important to black voters.
"I think we have to wait and see where we are a week from now," a Democratic strategist told The Hill. "She still has an advantage in the battlegrounds. But people should gird themselves for a longer night than many expect right now."
NPR's Mara Liasson told Fox News Channel's "Special Report" that the numbers are roughly where they have been all along.
"Donald Trump has yet to kind of reverse the dynamic of the race and start getting ahead in the battleground states and flipping some of those blue states red," she told host Brett Baier.
Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, appearing on the same program, said that while Liasson was right on the numbers being the same as they were at the beginning of the year, Trump has managed to climb back impressively after hitting bottom a month ago when an audio tape was released of him making lewd comments about women.
"That was an occasion where Trump could have just disappeared," Krauthammer said. "He didn't."
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