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Politics

Could Trump win the US presidency after all?

November 1, 2016

A new survey gives Donald Trump a small edge in the US presidential race. The poll was conducted as the FBI announced it would renew its scrutiny of Hillary Clinton's State Department emails.

https://p.dw.com/p/2S028
Trump eröffnet neues Hotel in Las Vegas
Image: picture-alliance/dpa

A Washington Post-ABC News Tracking Poll shows Donald Trump with a 0.7-point lead over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton - within the poll's 3-point margin of error. Trump, who had never led the survey, received a boost after the FBI, the domestic intelligence agency, notified Congress on Friday that it would renew an investigation into Clinton's use of a private email server  as secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.

Officials found new emails in a computer belonging to Anthony Weiner, who separated from Clinton aide Huma Abedin after years of revelations of his double life under the cybersex moniker Carlos Danger. A representative said Abedin herself had learned from media reports on Friday that the laptop belonging to her estranged husband might contain emails of hers.

Most forecasts give Clinton the state-by-state edge, which generally proves more important in the US's complicated Electoral College system. The RealClearPolitics.com average of major national surveys still shows Clinton, who represented the US state of New York as senator from 2001 to 2009, leading Trump, 45 percent to 43 percent.

'Everything you have'

In summer, FBI Director James Comey said a yearlong investigation revealed that Clinton had been "extremely careless" with classified information but declined to charge her. A Clinton representative said that Comey should detail the FBI's inquiries into Trump if it was going to announce vague suspicions about the former first lady.

"If you're in the business of releasing information about investigations on presidential candidates, release everything you have on Donald Trump," campaign manager Robby Mook told CNN. "Release the information on his connections to the Russians."

Officials have found no direct link between Trump's campaign and Russian hackers, according to The New York Times. The United States has blamed Russia for cyberattacks on Democratic organizations that have revealed efforts to rig Clinton's primary fight with the independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders in her favor.

In October, Trump's support plummeted after a video emerged in which he bragged about sexual assault. In more bad news, The Times reports that Trump's lawyers have called his tax-avoidance "legally dubious." The Times reported that Congress has even outlawed one tactic that Trump has used to avoid paying millions in personal income tax.

Taking the offensive against Trump, at rallies on Monday in the battleground state of Ohio, Clinton said he had a bad temper and an overly cavalier attitude toward nuclear weapons.

mkg/msh (Reuters, AFP, dpa, AP)