New ABC/WaPo poll: Trump 46 Hillary 45

It can't be easy being a criminal and running for president. The FBI is so unfair to you! Talking about its investigation into your criminal activities just when you're trying to secure votes! How bogus! Poor, poor Hillary Clinton. If it's not James Comey making it known that hundreds of thousands of e-mails from her schlock, homebrew server were found on the laptop of a perverted creep, it's Julian Assange telling everyone about your pay-for-play corruption, or everyone finding out you had a mole at CNN who was feeding you debate questions.

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How is a cheater supposed to win when everyone won't stop talking about her cheating. It's just not fair. And apparently it's having an effect. We've been seeing polls trending in Trump's direction, but until this morning we hadn't seen one that shows Trump pulling out in front. Until this morning, that is:

Forty-six percent of likely voters support Trump in the latest results, with 45 percent for Clinton. Taking it to the decimal for illustrative purposes, a mere .7 of a percentage point divides them. Third-party candidate Gary Johnson has 3 percent, a new low; Jill Stein, 2 percent. Trump now leads Clinton by 8 points in the share of voters who are very enthusiastic about their choice as of Friday. But, compared to past elections it’s low for both of them –- 53 percent for Trump, 45 percent for Clinton. Strong enthusiasm for Clinton has lost 7 points since the start of tracking, especially Friday through Sunday. This is possibly an after-effect of the renewed controversy over her use of a private email server while secretary of state. Trump’s strong enthusiasm has held steady in tracking, which started Oct. 20. The 1-point Clinton-Trump race overall is well within the survey’s margin of sampling error. Combining the last seven nights –- across which results have been very stable –- the results flip to 46-45 percent, Clinton-Trump, with .4 percentage point gap. Again, it is not a significant difference. Either way, the results are exceedingly close. Trump’s +1 is a noteworthy result; he’s led Clinton numerically just once before, +2 in late May (among registered voters in a two-way test), after he clinched the GOP nomination while Clinton was still in a duel with Bernie Sanders in the Democratic race.

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There are a lot of possible ways to look at this, so let's jump into them. If the polling mainly happened in the immediate aftermath, it could merely reflect people's knee-jerk reaction to the news of the FBI reopening the investigtion, just as Trump's collapsing numbers after the Billy Bush take reflected initial reaction to that. It took time but for the most part Trump has recovered. Maybe Hillary would do, if there was time. Is there enough? Then again, maybe this has more to do with how close the vote is. I've always figured the polls would tighten at the end as Republican voters cheesed off about Trump being the nominee finally realized they have no choice but to vote for him to stop Hillary. If you combine that, which was inevitable, with people's reaction to the Carlos Danger revelation, the poll movement might reflect a combination of Republicans coming home and independents finally deciding she is the worse of two bad choices. Of course, any national polling has to also be discussed with the gigantic caveat that we don't have a national election. We have a federal, state-by-state election in which it's 270 electoral votes that put you over the top. And as everyone who watches elections will tell you, the map is difficult for Republicans. And that's true, except for one thing: No Republican in the past century has won the popular vote and lost the electoral vote. Now, there's a first time for everything, but let's look at the last time a Republican won the popular vote. That was of course 2004, when George W. Bush won just over 51 percent of the vote. That margin was enough to pull Colorado, Ohio, Florida and other crucial battleground states into his column and give him 286 electoral votes.

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To be sure, aside from Ohio, Florida and Iowa, there haven't been many polls that would encourage Trump supporters out of the battleground states. But that could be a product of state polling not yet having caught up to national trends. If Trump is really pulling into a national lead, you would expect that to be reflected on Election Day in the form of battleground states also carrying him over the top. It's possible it won't go that way, of course. The Bush electoral vote win without the popular vote in 2000 was also unprecedented in modern times until it happened, so the most you can say about anything that's never happened is that it's never happened yet. But I'd say there's a big difference between a poll two-to-four weeks out and a poll less than a week before the election. At this point you start really thinking seriously about the likely consequences of the decision you're going to make. Trump may be all the unappealing things people say he is, but does that justify locking in four years of institutional corruption like we've been seeing coming out of the Clinton Foundation, the IRS and the Justice Department? Because that's what you're going to get with Hillary. It's one thing to elect a guy who doesn't really know that much about how to use the levers of power. It's another thing entirely to elect someone who knows very well how to use them, and will use them for no good every chance she gets. What a week this is going to be.

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