Democrats are hoping party conventions and vice presidential picks will reset the narrative of the 2016 race, after a concerning set of new polls showed Hillary Clinton running even nationally with Donald Trump and the race tightening in key battleground states.

A New York Times/CBS poll released Thursday morning showed Clinton and Trump in a dead heat nationally, capturing 40 percent of the vote each, with 67 percent of registered voters saying Clinton is neither honest nor trustworthy. More worrisome for the former secretary of state, Clinton has dipped 10 percentage points in the same survey since April, when she led Trump 50 percent to 40 percent.


“Look at these polls,” Virginia Rep. Don Beyer told a crowd at Clinton’s Thursday rally in the D.C. suburbs. “They’re confusing, they’re scary, they’re sorta tied.”

For Democrats already bracing for Trump to take a solid lead after an expected convention bump next week, the fear is that now that bump will come on top of his running even with Clinton.

But Democrats close to the campaign dismissed the latest tightening -- Clinton gave up a six-point national lead over Trump since a similar CBS poll conducted last month -- as a temporary result of bad coverage related to FBI Director James Comey’s devastating comments last week about her email use at the State Department.

Joel Benenson, Clinton’s chief pollster and strategist, shrugged off the NYT/CBS poll as an “outlier.”

“The preponderance of polls, they all show a fairly close race nationally -- the Times poll happens to be an outlier among those conducted over the last week. Most polls have a small lead, a low to single-digit lead, for Hillary Clinton,” he told POLITICO, pointing to battleground polls that showed Clinton “holding a small lead in most of these states” and in some states “wider than that.”

For a clearer picture of the state of the race, other Clinton allies said, the number to parse was support among partisans -- and they expressed confidence that her support among Democrats is still stronger than Trump’s support among Republicans.

But some acknowledged concern that the race should be so tight and called for major resources to be devoted to getting out the vote. “Of course I’m worried,” said Paul Begala, a longtime Clinton ally who advises her aligned super PAC, Priorities USA. “The thought of a Trump presidency shoots me out of bed each morning like I have a Roman candle up my ass. The Democrats will need to do all they can to organize and motivate their voters or they will be looking for homes in New Zealand in four months.”

The real baseline for the race, Democrats close to the campaign said, will show up two weeks after the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, when both convention bumps have flattened.

Meanwhile, there’s a bright side to public polls that frighten casual observers of the race: They help to scare up voters, volunteers and online donations. Privately, Clinton operatives said they are not worried -- they believe it’s a close race, but not a tied race. But in fundraising efforts, Clinton’s team has acted concerned about the Quinnipiac poll they internally scoff at. "If you hear people saying that Hillary can't possibly lose this race, make sure they see these numbers," Campaign Manager Robby Mook wrote in an email to a donor list on Thursday night.

Their hope is that the latest poll is just reflecting shockwaves from last week's bad news. Campaign officials tried to spin Comey’s findings -- recommending no criminal charges even as he described her handling of classified material as “extremely careless” -- into a positive. But the new numbers tell a different story: The NYT/CBS poll showed 46 percent of registered voters still think Clinton broke the law.

And while the campaign tried to put a happy face on Comey’s testimony, within the Clinton campaign, a source with knowledge of conversations said, there was disagreement about how to interpret the good news wrapped in bad news.

“The Republicans moved from the underlying issues to whether she was telling the truth about the emails since the story broke -- that seems like it’s having some effect,” conceded a Democrat close to the campaign.

“There’s no doubt that the substance of what the FBI director said is something voters listen to and it’s part of what they will be making their decision on,” said Democratic strategist Anita Dunn, a former top official in the Obama White House. “But it’s not the only thing they will be making their decision on.”

Still, many saw the tightening polls as a correction to a lead posted in June that they never thought was real, anyway. “In June, Donald Trump had possibly the worst month I’ve seen any major party candidate struggle through,” added Dunn. “It resulted in an artificial margin being created. I also don’t believe that he is tied. This is a result of 10 days of bad press for Hillary Clinton that is about to be overtaken by the vice presidential choices and by the conventions.”

For now, Democrats said they feel confident about Colorado and Virginia, two battleground states with large Latino populations (21 percent of the population in Colorado is Hispanic, as is 9 percent of the population in Virginia). Clinton officials are more concerned about Florida, where they think it will come down to a one-point race, than Pennsylvania, where the recent Quinnipiac University poll showed Trump with a two-point lead.

“While this process may start in Iowa, recent history shows it ends in Florida,” said Craig Smith, Clinton’s senior adviser based in Florida, noting that every race in the state comes down to one point.

It wasn't just Democrats who still think Clinton is in a better position to win the White House in November than Trump.

Anti-Trump activist Tim Miller, former communications director to Jeb Bush, last April told POLITICO that Clinton “would beat [Trump] from jail.” He isn’t hedging on that position.

“Her numbers are near jail-level now, but Trump’s vulnerabilities are greater going forward -- she has a lot of built-in demographic, mathematic and structural advantages that will lead her to winning, despite her extreme flaws,” he said. “The question is who has room for growth, and because of his unpopularity with African Americans, Hispanics and millennials, I don’t know where his growth comes from.”

For the moment, people around Clinton’s campaign are hung up on trying to help fix the trust issue. “It’s just difficult, it’s a problem,” said one Democrat with close ties to the campaign. “I’m not sure what the answer is.”

And then there are problems for which there are no answers.

“You have voters who have traditionally been Democratic voters, non-college educated whites, who are clearly deciding they are willing to opt for radical change even if they have concerns about the person offering it,” Dunn said. “That’s the tension here. For some of these Trump voters, they don’t love everything he says or does, but they’re voting on something much bigger. You’ve got to respect that.”