The race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton continued to show signs of tightening on Wednesday, with less than one week before Election Day.
A new IBD tracking poll of national voters found the two presidential candidates tied with 44% of support. Clinton had previously been up in the poll by 5 points.
The RealClearPolitics national average found Clinton up just 1.7 points over Trump, a significantly smaller margin than the 6.5-point lead the former secretary of state had over Trump two weeks ago.
The tightening in national polls also mirrored Trump's apparent surge in several battleground states.
According the RealClearPolitics average of recent polls, the Republican presidential nominee led Clinton by one-point in Florida, a state that the Trump campaign has identified as a must-win in order to garner the 270 electoral votes needed to secure the presidency. The most recent polls suggested that Trump will hold Republican states like Arizona and Georgia where the Clinton campaign was hoping to state upset victories and rack up their electoral college lead.
The Clinton campaign and its allies also appeared to be doubling back to several other key areas previously thought to be fairly safe blue states.
The Clinton campaign and Priorities USA, a major Democratic super PAC backing Clinton, this week purchased ads in Colorado and Michigan, where ads were previously pulled from the airwaves amid the former secretary of state's dominant poll numbers. Though polls leading up to the Democratic primary earlier this year suggested the former secretary of state would easily win the state, Sen. Bernie Sanders defeated her in an upset win that gave his campaign a much-needed electoral jolt.
Still, its unclear whether Trump's late stage polling advantage represented a significant shift or a momentary fluctuation in the polls.
Matt McDermott, a left-leaning pollster and senior analyst at Whitman Insight Strategies, pointed out that Clinton still maintains healthy leads in battleground states like Virginia, Colorado, and Pennsylvania. Further, McDermott argued that the fundamentals of the race haven't changed as much as some public polls suggest.
"Structurally, the state of the race is fairly stable. We’re sitting at about a 3-to-6-point Clinton national lead, and a nearly insurmountable lead in battleground states to get her over 270 electoral voters," McDermott told Business Insider. "While public polling has been extremely volatile this cycle, internal polling (on both sides) has shown incredible stability in this race."
He added: "There’s no evidence to suggest Trump has been successful in overcoming his structural negatives in this race. He remains disliked by nearly 3 in 5 voters. Trump’s problem continues to be that an overwhelming majority of voters do not see his as qualified for the office he’s seeking, or think he has the temperament for the job."
Other pollsters also view recent swings in the polls with some skepticism.
YouGov pollsters highlighted a phenomenon called "non-response bias," a theory that polling participation tends to drop among bad news for a candidate, suggesting that news events such as the FBI's announcement about its continued investigation into Clinton may have dampened participation.
And a last minute surge may not help Trump as much, considering many ballots have already been cast.
According to early voting totals on Monday, 22 million Americans have already voted. Early voting seemed to suggest that Clinton may have a lead in battleground states like Nevada, though low black voter turnout in Florida and Ohio has alarmed many Democrats.
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