2016 Clinton looks poised to lock it up Trump dashes across the country as Clinton seeks to solidify the swing states after the FBI cloud lifts.

Pressing to lock in her electoral advantage in the final hours of the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton will summon the collective firepower of the last two Democratic presidents on Monday while Donald Trump scrambles furiously across state lines in a last-ditch bid to scale the blue wall of support she has built.

In a shock announcement only 40 hours before the first polls were set to open, Trump was robbed of his favorite rhetorical cudgel on Sunday. FBI Director James Comey told Congress he had concluded his review into new Clinton-related emails only nine days after he shook up the race by announcing there was a review underway at all.


The news of his probe — and the subsequent ricocheting jumble of the words “FBI,” “email,” and “Clinton” on television and news sites — had allowed Trump to claw back into the presidential race, lifting him from his polling doldrums in late October. His campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, tried to brush aside Comey’s announcement as insignificant.

“We have not made this a centerpiece of our messaging,” she said on MSNBC.

Except that Trump had. And now he can’t.

He had used the return of the FBI review to powerfully make the case that Clinton was the candidate of yesterday’s problems, and he was the outsider with tomorrow’s solutions. The probe was quickly and prominently spliced into TV ads. And only hours earlier, Trump in Iowa had railed against Clinton as the “prime suspect in a far-reaching criminal investigation.” He has repeatedly called Clinton’s private email server investigation “worse than Watergate” in recent days.

But after the FBI reaffirmed its conclusions from July — when Comey said “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring a case against Clinton — Trump returned to railing against the “rigged system.”

“You have to understand, it’s a rigged system and she’s protected,” he said at a Minnesota airport rally.

Later, in Michigan, Trump questioned the FBI’s quick resolution. “You can't review 650,000 emails in eight days," he said. "You can't do it folks. Hillary Clinton is guilty.”

Even before the FBI cloud lifted, the final round of national polls released Sunday all showed Clinton with a lead. Trump languished below 45 percent in each. Her leads were powered by strong showings among minority voters and women, while Trump’s total was padded mostly by white men.

The education gap was stark. Among white voters in the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, those without college degrees preferred Trump by a 60 percent to 30 percent margin. Clinton led white voters with college degrees by 10 points, 51 percent 41 percent — a remarkable 40-point spread.

On the eve of the election, already more than 41 million ballots have already been cast nationwide.

“While things might have gotten tighter, the fundamentals of a Clinton victory are still strong,” said Jefrey Pollock, a pollster for the pro-Clinton super PAC Priorities USA.

Trump held five rallies on Sunday, including three in states — Michigan, Virginia and Minnesota — where he has not led in any polling. His campaign pitched it as a sign of bold confidence and incursions into enemy territory. The fact that Clinton has added late, rear-guard stops in Michigan and will dispatch President Obama there on Monday boosted their spirits further. (“They’re sending her back to Michigan!” exclaimed one Trump adviser with glee.)

“We’re got them on the run,” Conway declared on MNSBC.

But Democrats said Trump’s appearances in states where he is clearly behind are simply a sign that his other pathways to 270 electoral votes have narrowed to virtually nothing — even before the FBI announcement in her favor. (Another Trump adviser said now that “Michigan is the most likely out of those Midwestern blue states” to go Republican, compared to Pennsylvania, where both camps have invested heavily, and Wisconsin, where Trump campaigned last week.)

Democrats were buoyed by scenes Friday night at a Mexican super market in Nevada, where massive lines of voters waited to cast their ballots. All told, the Democratic cast-ballot lead in Clark County, home to Las Vegas, is now bigger than Obama’s margin in 2012, when he easily carried the state.

“There are multiple models that show her to be at least a handful [of percentage points] up statewide,” Pollock said of Nevada, estimating that 60 percent of likely votes have already been cast. “And if that’s the case, it would mean that Donald Trump would need to win Nevada on Election Day by ten in order to get the race back to even. That’s not a hill. That’s a Yucca mountain-sized hill.”

One prominent Republican strategist tracking the state conceded, “The Nevada early voting numbers have scared the hell out of me. I hope it doesn’t cost us the Senate seat and the two House races.”

On Sunday, Clinton appeared at a black church in Philadelphia in the morning and then flew to Cleveland to campaign with basketball star LeBron James. She was midair when the FBI news broke, and she deplaned alongside one of her oldest and closest confidantes, Cheryl Mills. In the evening, she rallied supporters in New Hampshire.

Bruce Springsteen is to appear at a Hillary Clinton campaign event Monday in Philadelphia. | AP Photo

On her final full day on the trail, Clinton will start with a stop in Grand Rapids, Michigan and then the blowout rally in Philadelphia, where she, President Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama and former President Bill Clinton will all attend. It will be the first joint rally for the two Democratic power couples. Adding to the event’s star power, the campaign announced that Bruce Springsteen will perform, reprising a closing role that the rock star held for Obama in 2012 and John Kerry in 2004.

One of the reasons Clinton has focused on Pennsylvania and Michigan in the closing days is that both states do not allow for early voting, meaning motivating supporters on the eve of the election is key. Clinton also will hold a midnight rally in North Carolina on Monday.

Clinton isn’t just making her closing argument on the trail. She has reserved an expensive two-minute national television ad to air in prime time on NBC’s The Voice and CBS’s Kevin Can Wait to reach a massive estimated audience of 20 million. The campaign is billing the special ad as a “unifying message.”

Trump will blitz across five states on Monday, going from Florida to North Carolina to Pennsylvania to New Hampshire to Michigan — much of the same ground as Clinton.

Many of his rallies have been organized in a matter of hours. Trump arrived in Minnesota on Sunday, for instance, after canceling a rally in Wisconsin that would have competed with a Green Bay Packers football game. When he saw a crowd stuck behind a fence outside the airplane hangar where he was speaking, Trump ripped into his own staff.

“Who are the geniuses that set this up?” Trump said.

It was Trump’s first stop in Minnesota and it was unclear if his campaign had even polled a state that Obama won by nearly 8 percentage points. It appeared that Trump had been watching television coverage of his unusual appearance in the state before he arrived.

“If I don’t win Minnesota, I’m going to look real bad to those pundits,” Trump said of his critics. “So far, in two years, I’ve been right and they’ve been wrong.”

He promised one more shocker was still in store. “We’re going to have some surprise on Tuesday,” he predicted.