With nine days to go until the Presidential election, Hillary Clinton remains the strong favorite. She’s ahead in the national polls, and the early-voting figures are going in her direction. In the contest to amass two hundred and seventy votes in the Electoral College, her opponent, Donald Trump, is where he’s been for some time now: holding a weak hand, and needing to pull an inside straight.

All that said, Clinton is in the midst of her worst stretch of news since mid-September, when she fell ill with pneumonia and stumbled outside Ground Zero. Over the past week, the headlines have been dominated by the problems of Obamacare, the WikiLeaks revelations about “Clinton Inc.,” and James Comey’s October surprise. Even before the F.B.I. director delivered his shocker on Friday, the negative news flow was weighing on Clinton’s poll numbers.

You can see that in the national poll averages and, especially, in the tracking polls, which try to capture day-to-day movements. This time last week, according to the Real Clear Politics poll average, Clinton was leading Donald Trump by 5.6 percentage points in a four-way match-up that also includes Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party candidate, and Jill Stein, of the Green Party. At midday Sunday, Clinton’s lead was 3.4 percentage points.

Other poll averages—each poll average is constructed somewhat differently—show Clinton retaining a bigger lead. According to the Huffington Post’s version, she is still leading by more than six points. In FiveThirtyEight’s version, she is up by about five points. But both of these averages also show a modest tightening over the past week.

Perhaps of more concern to the Democratic campaign is what’s been happening in the tracking polls, which survey people every day. The most dramatic shift has come in the ABC News/Washington Post tracker. A week ago, this survey showed Clinton leading Trump by twelve percentage points: fifty per cent to thirty-eight per cent. On Sunday, two days after the Comey news broke, the same poll shows Clinton leading by just one point: forty-six per cent to forty-five per cent.

Now, it’s almost always a mistake to put too much weight on a single survey. However, two other trackers also show Trump making up ground over the past few days, albeit in less dramatic fashion. According to a survey from Investors Business Daily/TIPP, Clinton was leading by two points on Sunday, down from four points on Saturday. In the Los Angeles Times/USC poll, where Clinton was leading Trump 45.1 per cent to 43.8 per cent last Monday, she is now trailing him 44.1 per cent to 46.0 per cent.

Again, it would be an error to put much weight on these specific numbers, or the fact that the Los Angeles Times/USC poll shows Trump with a slight lead. It surveys voters in a different way from most others pollsters, and it openly concedes that its methodology may favor Trump somewhat. But even biased tracking polls can provide an unbiased indication of which way things are trending, and the fact that all three trackers are showing Trump gaining can’t be ignored.

Obviously, what everyone wants to know is where the numbers will go from here, and how the e-mail story is going to affect things. The short answer is: we don’t know yet. But the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll does provide a few clues. While conducting the poll on Friday and Saturday, researchers brought up the F.B.I.’s announcement that it was reviewing additional e-mails connected with the investigation into Clinton’s private e-mail server. These researchers asked voters if this “issue” would make them more likely or less likely to vote for Clinton, or whether it would make no difference to them. Two per cent of respondents said it would make them more likely to vote for Clinton. Sixty-four per cent said it would make no difference to their decision. And thirty-four per cent said it would make them less likely to vote for Clinton.

Democrats will be reassured by the fact that two-thirds of the respondents effectively dismissed the F.B.I.’s announcement despite all the news coverage it garnered. They will interpret it as supporting the theory that Clinton’s e-mail troubles, and doubts about her honesty and trustworthiness, are already reflected in the polling figures, and that they won’t prevent a majority of people from voting for her over Trump.

There’s other evidence to support this argument. The same ABC News/Washington Post poll showed that, despite the race tightening up, Clinton retains a sizable advantage over Trump in some key areas of public opinion, including character. Asked which candidate has the strongest moral character, forty-six per cent said Clinton, and thirty-eight per cent said Trump. Asked which one was more qualified to serve as President, fifty-four per cent said Clinton and thirty-six per cent said Trump. Other recent polls have confirmed the same message: voters have issues with Clinton, but they have bigger issues with Trump. He still has the highest unfavorable ratings of any Presidential candidate in recent history, and he still has a huge credibility problem.

Ultimately, these are the main reasons his chances of prevailing are slim. Despite making up some ground in the tracking polls, most of the regular polls show him stuck somewhere between forty and forty-two per cent, which is about where he has been for months, give or take a few ups and downs. To catch up with and defeat Clinton, he would need to break out of the box he has been trapped in for a long time. Given all the baggage he is carrying, that still seems highly unlikely—indeed, some polling experts reckon it is virtually out of the question given the polarization of the electorate. ”One thing is almost certain: [the Comey story] will not affect Clinton’s lead substantially,” Sam Wang, of the Princeton Election Consortium, wrote on Saturday. “Basically, the press needs a new direction, even if conditions haven’t really changed.”

And if anything, the challenge facing Trump at the state level looks even more formidable than the national numbers. To have any chance at all at winning the Electoral College, he has to carry Florida, North Carolina, and Ohio. The latest polls indicate that he and Clinton are virtually tied in Florida and Ohio, but nine of the last ten polls carried out in North Carolina have put Clinton ahead. According to the Real Clear Politics poll average, her lead there is 2.9 percentage points. Even if Trump carries all three of these states, he would still need to hold all the other states that are leaning Republican and pick up another eleven Electoral College votes somewhere. Most analysts once viewed Pennsylvania, which has twenty votes, as Trump’s best bet, but the polls indicated Clinton has a substantial lead there, which is holding up. (Three polls carried out during the past week showed her ahead by eight points, seven points, and five points.)

Assuming Pennsylvania is lost to him, Trump needs to carry Nevada and New Hampshire, plus the 2nd Congressional District of Maine, which carries a single Electoral College vote. But most of the polls indicated that Trump is still behind in Nevada and New Hampshire, and, moreover, he is facing a formidable Democratic electoral machine, which has already garnered a lot of support from early voters in many key states.