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Top Democrats warn against writing off Trump

It’s no surprise that Hillary Clinton’s campaign wants rank-and-file Democrats to stay concerned about the idea of Donald Trump in the White House: supporter emails like Monday’s titled, “He may still beat me” is how they’ll drive voters to the polls and cash into the campaign accounts.

Clinton expands battleground state map with push into Arizona, Georgia

Representatives of Hillary Clinton’s campaign phoned state Democratic leaders in Arizona and Georgia this week to alert them of plans to begin transferring funds to hire more field organizers in those states, according to several Democratic officials familiar with the calls.

Polls in both states — which Republican nominee Mitt Romney carried in 2012 — show a tightening race between Clinton and Donald Trump. The move by the Clinton campaign suggests a bid to expand the number of battleground states in play in November.

Clinton rolls out more GOP endorsements, announces new group for Republican outreach

After rolling out a few dozen prominent Republican and independent supporters in recent weeks, Hillary Clinton’s campaign sought Wednesday to bring some structure to its effort, launching a group called Together for America to coordinate continuing outreach.

At FiveThirtyEight, we generally prefer state polls to national polls. So far, though, we haven’t had many of them to work with. If you’re getting dozens of national polls every week, but just a smattering of state-level surveys — and that’s what we’ve been getting — you’re better off inferring what’s going on in the states from the trend in national polls, rather than the other way around.

We’ve reached that stage of the campaign. The back-to-school commercials are on the air, and the “unskewing” of polls has begun — the quadrennial exercise in which partisans simply adjust the polls to get results more to their liking, usually with a thin sheen of math-y words to make it all sound like rigorous analysis instead of magical thinking.