FORT LAUDERDALE: Hillary Clinton launched a final week election offensive Tuesday to lock down the state of Florida, key to Donald Trump’s White House dream, as polls showed their race narrowing.
The Republican had been buoyed earlier in the day by a national poll that showed him sneaking a narrow lead in national voting intentions, sending shivers through US markets.
But when the 69-year-old Democratic candidate took to the stage for a late Fort Lauderdale rally her fierce rhetoric was backed by new survey of early voters that shows her winning Florida.
“Well, I’ll tell you what!” she declared, her voice cracking but her tone triumphant. “Donald Trump has proven himself to be temperamentally unfit and unqualified to be president of the United States.”
As she spoke, pollster TargetSmart forecast that she could win Florida — and effectively bar Trump any route to the White House — by a massive eight point margin, 48 to 40 percent.
The Florida poll, conducted with the College of William and Mary, used only a small sample of voters but crucially it targeted those who had already case ballots under the state’s early voting law.
An average of earlier Florida polls by tracker RealClearPolitics gives Trump a narrow one point lead there, but TargetSmart’s survey suggests that many registered Republicans have switched camps.
The 70-year-old real estate mogul will be undaunted by the numbers, claiming at his own Wisconsin rally to be ahead in all the key battlegrounds and citing a new nationwide poll that pit him in the lead.
The ABC News/Washington Post tracking poll showed him leading Clinton by 46 to 45 percent, reflecting other polls that still put Clinton in the lead but suggest the race has narrowed as November 8 looms.
And renewed FBI scrutiny of Clinton’s controversial use of a private email server as secretary of state has excited Republicans and underlined public doubts about the Democrat’s trustworthiness.
