WASHINGTON—Donald Trump 45, Hillary Clinton 43.

Panic time for Clinton supporters? No. But not party time either. They woke up on the first day after Labour Day to a CNN poll that showed Trump ahead of her by two points.

Caveats abound. The poll was conducted over a holiday weekend. It’s always best to look at poll averages, and the Democratic nominee retains an average lead of two points. She leads in the key swing states. She has a far superior ground-level campaign. She is, in sum, still the heavy favourite.

But this is a far closer race than it was a month ago, when there was landslide talk brewing. And it’s far closer than casual observers might expect of a race between a former secretary of state and a never-elected businessman who has infuriated much of the country.

Here are 11 possible reasons, some of them overlapping, why we’re not seeing a Clinton blowout.

1)Partisan polarization: Presidential landslides used to be common. Not anymore: the last double-digit victory was Ronald Reagan’s in 1984.

It’s hard for anybody to dominate anybody in a country where partisan preferences are so hardened. Well under a fifth of today’s U.S. voters are true swing voters. That means that even a widely disliked Republican nominee, as Trump is, begins the race with a nearly automatic 40-plus per cent of the vote.

“By any past historical standard,” said Democratic strategist Craig Varoga, who worked on Bill Clinton’s 1996 campaign, “this guy should be at like 35 per cent and no higher, and the real question should be whether he breaks 40. But the question we’re all asking ourselves is, ‘Can he actually win?’”

2) A perception of dishonesty: Drip, drip. Hillary Clinton’s slow-motion email scandal has re-emerged every few weeks, reinforcing long-standing concerns about her truthfulness. Though voters overwhelmingly think she is qualified and knowledgeable, three in five think she is dishonest; nearly the same number don’t like her.

“‘Who would be better equipped to lead the country?’ She would be. ‘Who would be better equipped to handle nuclear weapons?’ She would. ‘Who would handle an international crisis better?’ She would. That’s what all our numbers show. But in the end, the sort of from-the-gut issues, honesty and trustworthiness, she just has abysmal numbers,” said Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll.

3)Third-party candidates: For a while, the Libertarian Party’s Gary Johnson (8 per cent in the polls) and the Green Party’s Jill Stein (3 per cent) appeared to be grabbing votes equally from Clinton and Trump. Now, they are mostly taking from Clinton. While some of these people might drift back if the race looks tight on Election Day, they’re hurting her right now.

4) White noncollege men: Clinton, like Barack Obama and John Kerry before her, is getting whomped among white men without a college degree — 68 per cent to 27 per cent in the latest ABC poll. That would be the worst showing by a Democrat with this group since at least 1980.

5)The Sanders base: Defeated Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders has endorsed Clinton, but many of his voters have so far refused to come along — as many as 40 per cent in one recent poll. Most of the dissenters are going to Stein and Johnson rather than Trump, but it hurts Clinton anyway.

6)A drop-off with black voters: Racial minorities loathe Trump, but Clinton is not yet doing as well with all of them as Obama did. For example, Obama received about 93 per cent of the black vote in 2012. Though Trump’s approval rating with blacks is abominable — under 5 per cent — Clinton has received around 87 per cent of the black vote in polls that include Johnson and Stein.

7) Temporary invisibility: Clinton vanished from public view for much of August, choosing to spend her time at private fundraisers with the rich. Trump repeatedly suggested there was something amiss, accusing Clinton of “hiding.” Her absence allowed Trump to dominate the airwaves to an even greater extent than usual. It may have also given Trump ammunition. “If you’re on the fence or you’re thinking about this, and you’re not seeing her, and every day Donald Trump says ‘Hey, where has she been,’ that can’t help,” Malloy said.

8) The “fundamentals”: The economy is growing and Obama’s approval rating has rebounded, so the election’s so-called “fundamentals” could be worse for Clinton. But they aren’t great: second-quarter growth was just 1.1 per cent, Obama’s approval hovers right around 50 per cent, and the Democrats are trying to win a third time in a row. These aren’t underlying conditions that suggest a huge win.

9) Desire for change: In every poll, a majority of Americans says the country is on the wrong track. (The average of the polls: 64 per cent say “wrong track,” 28 per cent “right direction.”) Clinton has branded herself as the continuity candidate. There is a big constituency for more of the same, but it has a ceiling.

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10) Desensitization to attacks: Clinton’s main argument — echoed by much of the media — is that Trump is an unprecedentedly unfit candidate, erratic and extreme. But trust in media gatekeepers has eroded, and this kind of rhetoric can sound the same old song to people bombarded with attack ads for years. “Negative campaigns have acclimated many voters to charges of extremism,” Varoga said, “so that when a truly dangerous candidate is slouching toward the White House, the warnings can seem like just another wild accusation in the middle of an ‘anything goes’ campaign.”

11) Trump’s “discipline”: Yes, indignant Clinton fans, it’s a low bar, perhaps absurdly so. But all Trump had to do to reassure some fraction of wavering Republican-leaning voters was stop rambling and raving quite so much. When he stuck to a TelePrompTer for most of a couple weeks, he helped to stop his bleeding.

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