KING OF PRUSSIA, PA.—Here is why Democrats should worry.

Donald Trump scares Brittany Cook, an undecided voter in the critical suburbs of Philadelphia. But Hillary Clinton makes her uneasy, too. When Cook heard that the FBI was investigating Clinton emails, again, she became even more apprehensive.

“It makes me think there’s something wrong,” said Cook, a 31-year-old lawyer, as she shopped for groceries on Tuesday.

Here is why Democrats should not worry.

Pushing a cart in the next aisle was Venita Lane, a staffing supervisor who lives in the same suburban county as Cook. Asked about FBI director James Comey’s Friday letter to Congress, she responded with a blank shake of the head.

“To be honest with you, I’m not even following it. I made up my mind a long time ago,” she said. “Hillary Clinton, to me, is the lesser of two evils. I don’t care what comes out from now until the 8th. My mind is made up.”

Comey’s letter has at very least jolted a wild presidential election that briefly appeared like a Clinton cakewalk to the finish. With seven days to go, a race in which the candidate in the spotlight has always fallen in the polls is focused firmly on Clinton.

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There were hints that Comey’s vague disclosure has already hurt her. In a Washington Post/ABC tracking poll, Trump jumped Tuesday to a one-point lead, 46 per cent to 45 per cent, after being down by 12 percentage points just over a week ago. It was his first lead since May.

There was also data, though, to suggest that nothing much had actually changed. A Politico tracking poll had Clinton up three percentage points, exactly the same margin as before the revelation. The NBC News tracking poll was also unchanged, showing the exact same six-point Clinton lead.

“We do not see anything that would suggest that the FBI story is impacting our support,” a Clinton aide told reporters on Tuesday, BuzzFeed reported.

The electoral map remains clearly on her side. Trump has one week to make up vast ground in several states in which he has trailed for months. In Pennsylvania, for example, a new Franklin & Marshall College poll, conducted mostly before the Comey revelation, showed Clinton up 11 percentage points — and a whopping 36 points in the large, affluent and politically mixed suburban counties around Philadelphia.

But Clinton and her super PAC allies announced tactical moves that Trump’s team and some independent analysts took as confirmation the race was tightening.

Clinton’s team revealed plans to run its first ads of the general election in Michigan and New Mexico, two states that had been widely considered safe, and to resume ads after a long hiatus in Colorado and Virginia, two swing states that have seemed out of reach for Trump.

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In Michigan, a state won by every Democratic presidential candidate since 1992, a new poll showed Clinton with her typical lead of seven points — but Clinton announced that she would be spending part of the last Friday of the campaign at a get-out-the-vote rally in Detroit.

Trump delivered an invitation-only campaign speech on Tuesday in Pennsylvania’s Montgomery County, one of the key Philadelphia suburbs, in which he slammed Obamacare as disastrous but offered only a vague plan for its replacement with “health savings accounts.” His running mate, Mike Pence, slammed Canada’s “socialized” system and vowed an Obamacare replacement relying on the “power of the free market.”

They were, again, short on details; they were again appealing to the Republican base. The polling of the last week suggests some combination of Trump’s message and Clinton’s travails has pulled skeptical Republicans back on board with his campaign. Their renewed enthusiasm may cripple the Democrats’ hopes of winning back the Senate.

Trump likely needs Pennsylvania to win the presidency. It is nearly impossible to win the state without a strong showing in those counties. And Trump has never shown he had a chance of making inroads there.

“The firewall is not just the state. It’s also basically in five or six counties,” including Philadelphia proper, said G. Terry Madonna, director of Franklin & Marshall’s Center for Politics and Public Affairs. “He’s winning the white working class. But he’s losing college-educated voters.”

Even the most pessimistic of the models that crunch polling data, by the website FiveThirtyEight, gave Clinton a 71-per-cent chance of victory as of late Tuesday.

Trump’s best shot, of all the not-great shots, might be to win Ohio and Iowa, where he has usually led; win North Carolina, where he has consistently trailed; win Florida, which has been close; and then find some way to flip Wisconsin, a state with a higher-than-average proportion of white working class voters — where no Republican has won since 1984.

He was back there on Tuesday night, giving a rally speech in Eau Claire in which he warned that Clinton is “likely to be under investigation for many years, probably concluding in a very large scale criminal trial.”

Clinton had attempted to make the election’s final days a referendum on Trump’s character, not hers. She appeared in Dade City, Fla., on Tuesday with Alicia Machado, the Latina actress and former beauty queen whose appearance Trump disparaged in the 1990s and again this fall.

“Can we just stop for a minute and reflect on the absurdity of Donald Trump finding fault with Miss Universe? But you’ve got to ask, why does he do these things? Who does this? I will tell you who: a bully, that is who,” Clinton said.

The Comey letter, which numerous experts have said violated government protocol for avoiding law enforcement influence on an election, appears to have sparked further FBI intrigue; a series of unusual leaks have emerged from the bureau over the last two days. NBC News reported that the bureau has made “preliminary inquiries” into the foreign business ties of Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, who said, “There’s no investigation going on by the FBI that I’m aware of.”

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