Has the race changed now?

A lot of people are sure it has after Hillary Clinton was caught on video collapsing in the street. A lot of people have been sure about a lot of things in this 2016 contest against Donald Trump. Not a lot of them have had any lasting relationship to political reality.


“The pathways for him are still few. He’s not ahead in places he needs to win. Until that happens, she’s still in the driver’s seat, with or without yesterday,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Poll. “Everything becomes another thing in a long list: Trump’s misstatement No. 24, was that the deal breaker? The answer is no. Is Hillary’s secrecy, health and email foundation woes the deal breaker? Not apparently.”

Notable prominent Republicans are reluctant to say Trump might win. But there are those who are confident that people saying Clinton has any advantage — before or after her health scare — are just wrong. The race is too tight, and the Democrat’s bad weekend didn’t change that.

“That is a crazy thing to say, and it was crazy before she passed out,” said Curt Anderson, a Republican strategist advising the pro-Trump Rebuilding America Now super PAC. “Every rule has been broken in politics this year … This is one of the most elastic presidential races we’ve ever seen.”

And the election is still eight weeks away.

The first debate—when people will be counting every one of Clinton’s coughs along with every Trump stumble—is still two weeks away. The last debate is still five weeks away. And the image-reinforcing ad spending has yet to begin in force.

And despite Clinton’s collapse on her way out of the 9/11 memorial ceremony Sunday in New York, which feeds every conspiracy theorist, every hungry Republican, every nervous Democrat, and every journalist and commentator looking for signs of life in this race, the campaign, for all its tabloid moments, has been more like a Ferris wheel than a roller coaster.

There are the people who hate Clinton, hate the changes they see in the country which they think Clinton would only accelerate. They’re voting for Trump. Then there are the people who hate Trump, are disgusted by his race-baiting and terrified about him actually being president. They’re voting for Clinton.

The slice of people in between is and remains very, very thin, and includes all those Republicans queasy about having Clinton and her way of doing things in the White House but who are so opposed to Trump that they’re not even going to cast protest votes for Gary Johnson (at least not if they live in swing states).

“The idea that there is a huge chunk of independent voters out trying to make up their minds is a myth,” said Jim Hodges, a former governor of South Carolina and a Clinton supporter.

The Washington Post/ABC News poll out Sunday showed 7 in 10 voters have “definitely” chosen their candidate already. That’s in line with the number of undecideds in 2008 around this point in the race. Notably, 60 percent of voters said Clinton is qualified to serve as president, while only 36 percent said the same about Trump—a big hurdle for the Republican to overcome in persuading them to vote for him.

“It's people who are uncomfortable with both candidates, and it's more about making someone so uncomfortable with one of those candidates that they have to vote for the other,” said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, about the few undecided voters left in America. “But it's just playing on the edges at this point.”

It’s been all of two weeks since Trump reset his campaign by taking off for Mexico and then reset it again four hours later with a hard-line immigration speech that only muddled his position. It’s been all of seven days since Clinton made a big show of opening herself and her plane up to reporters only to ditch them once she couldn’t hide being ill, only to leave them in the dark for 90 minutes while trying to figure out what to say about why her knees buckled.

And even as the Sept. 26 debate approaches, rather than policy substance, this week looks to be more about the medical histories of both senior-citizen candidates than their positions on terrorism or job creation. Clinton’s campaign says she’ll be releasing a fuller history at the end of the week. Trump, whose existing public medical information consists of a letter dashed off in five minutes by a gastroenterologist while the limo waited outside, will talk about his health regimen on a TV show with Dr. Mehmet Oz, who has been repeatedly cited for promoting fake miracle cures and other junk science.

These popcorn moments, Miringoff said, distract from polling that’s overall been steady to the point of being boring, complete with the post-convention bounces and post-Labor Day tightening.

“The poll numbers have been much more typical than the headlines,” he said.

That’s what the Washington Post/ABC News poll shows over time: Clinton at 48 percent and Trump at 39 percent in June; Clinton at 45 percent and Trump at 39 percent in July; Clinton at 48 percent and Trump at 40 percent in August; Clinton at 46 percent and Trump at 41 percent now.

Overall, the Washington Post/ABC News poll showed Clinton up 8 points, slightly ahead of NBC News and Fox which showed her up by 6 and USA Today, which showed her up by 7. Those all came out Sunday, though, ahead of her incident. She's similarly stayed consistently ahead in battleground state polls, which tend to be more relevant for tracking the realities of presidential races than the mood swings.

But Republicans don’t buy that Clinton’s unforced errors over the past 72 hours are just another fleeting moment in this campaign. “In a year when everything is different, I think this is different too,” swatted back Anderson, the Republican strategist.

But Democrats have been waging a base election, and the Clinton campaign has been preparing all year for the early voting and turnout phase of the contest that’s about to start, down to pushing for specific polling place locations.

“With early vote, you’re already engaging people who are supportive, just have a less likelihood of voting than in a general election,” said Mitch Stewart, battleground states director for Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign.

There are, for example, 40 days of early voting in Iowa about to begin.

“In two or three days when this is no longer a story, there’s still a lot of chances to talk to the base,” Stewart said. “You’re not necessarily beholden to this episodic moment that can take focus away from the campaign.”

So far, the moment that Trump’s trying to stretch out isn’t Clinton’s collapse, but her “basket of deplorables” line from Friday night, stoking resentment among his supporters for being resented, hoping that drives up his base turnout and flips over enough people offended at her remarks. But outside of the Clinton gaffe-squading that took off on Twitter late Friday night after her comments went public, the Democrat’s base seemed to get just as excited, their only regret that she didn’t use a tougher word than deplorable.

After all, Sunday morning, before Clinton fell over, Donald Trump, Jr. posted to Instagram a “Deplorable” mock-up of “The Expendables” movie poster (tweeted by Trump longtime adviser Roger Stone the night before) with Pepe the Frog, the winking symbol of white nationalism, right next to Donald Trump. A little farther over to the right was conspiracy theory maven Alex Jones. Then Monday morning in what was otherwise a market-focused CNBC interview done in an attempt at mainstreaming, he again called Sen. Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas.”

“It can change the course,” said Tim Miller, a former Jeb Bush aide who’s led the charge on the Never Trump movement, “about whether Trump loses in a landslide or a traditional polarized election.”

Shane Goldmacher and Gabriel Debenedetti contributed to this report.