In one of the first indications of the impact of the FBI's bombshell announcement Friday in a battleground state, Donald Trump has surged to a 7-point lead in North Carolina, widely regarded as a bellwether, while expanding his advantage over Hillary Clinton to 6 in the latest USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times "Daybreak" poll, which tracks about 3,000 eligible voters until Election Day.

Clinton was ahead of Trump in the USC/L.A. Times poll as recently as Oct. 25, 45 to 44 percent.

The WRAL News poll in North Carolina, released Tuesday, was conducted after FBI Director James Comey notified members of Congress that the bureau was reopening an investigation into Clinton's handling of classified information while secretary of state.

A separate poll in the state, conducted by Elon University before the FBI announcement, found the race tied.

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In the WRAL News poll released three weeks ago, Clinton held a 46-44 lead.

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The Trump surge was dramatically reflected in the Washington Post/ABC News survey that had Clinton leading by 12 points a little more than a week ago but behind by 1 point in the survey released Tuesday. Wednesday's result found the race to be a dead heat.

The Clinton campaign on Tuesday dismissed the seismic shift as "bad polling," Politico reported.

“Sorry. It’s just not what we see at all; it’s not what other people seem to have,” a senior Clinton aide told the Democrat’s traveling press pool Tuesday. “There just seems to be something about that model that seems off.”

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The ABC News survey also showed Clinton trailing Trump for the first time in who’s regarded as more honest and trustworthy.

Clinton has lost 14 points among independents since early September in being seen as more honest than Trump and 13 points among moderates. She’s also lost 10 points among Democrats on the measure.

The survey also shows Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson continuing to lose support, from a peak of 9 percent support in September to just 3 percent now. Green Party candidate Jill Stein's support has remained relatively unchanged at 2 percent.

The Investor's Business Daily/TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence tracking poll had Clinton up by 4 points Friday but in a dead heat Wednesday.

Since Friday, the daily tracking survey found Trump making gains among both independents (up 5 points to 46 percent) and Republicans (up 4 points to 88 percent) since Friday. Also, 70 percent of Trump voters now say they strongly back Trump, up from 65 percent only four days ago.

Election guru Nate Silver, who has been predicting a Hillary Clinton White House, now says Trump has a path to victory and, according to his model, "if the race tightens any further, Clinton’s electoral edge is fragile."

His assimilation of polls shows a Clinton lead of 3 or 4 points, meaning Trump "remains an underdog, but no longer really a longshot."

He cautions people who protest that the popular vote doesn't matter because it's all about the Electoral College and Trump has no path to 270 electoral votes.

That presumes, he wrote on his FiveThirtyEight blog, that "states behave independently from national trends, when in fact they tend to move in tandem."

"We had a good illustration of this in mid-September," Silver wrote, "when in the midst of a tight race overall, about half of swing state polls showed Clinton trailing Trump, including several polls in Colorado, which would have broken Clinton’s firewall."

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