Girls, Hold Onto Your Boyfriends...

     ...CNN is now reporting a two-point lead for Trump in its latest poll of presidential preferences:

     Washington (CNN)Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton start the race to November 8 on essentially even ground, with Trump edging Clinton by a scant two points among likely voters, and the contest sparking sharp divisions along demographic lines in a new CNN/ORC Poll. Trump tops Clinton 45% to 43% in the new survey, with Libertarian Gary Johnson standing at 7% among likely voters in this poll and the Green Party's Jill Stein at just 2%.

     Granted that two percent is well within the margin of error – and even deeper within the “margin of lawyer” (Mark Steyn) – the turnaround from earlier CNN polling is shocking. It raised a few eyebrows at CNN, for sure.

     I find myself wondering whether Clinton’s campaign is collapsing under a pile of jackstraws: The Clinton Foundation, Benghazi, the dubious state of her health, the ongoing email scandal, her general unavailability to the press, her notable likability deficit, Trump’s successful outreach to “traditionally Democrat” voting blocs, and so forth. Individually, none of those matters seemed potent enough to bring her down. Together, their weight appears to be a ball and chain for her campaign.

     There are a number of wild cards to be reckoned with, including for whom the voters currently registering a preference for Johnson or Green will eventually cast their votes. But the trend lines are currently an indication of danger for the Clinton campaign. What corrective action it can take remains to be seen.

     From my perspective, I think the swamp is too deep and the alligators too numerous for Clinton to right herself. Whenever she addresses one of her negatives, her opponents will switch to another. Moreover, She has an overarching problem: the more public exposure she accepts, the less the public appears to like her. That, and her understandable reluctance to lean into it, will tangle all the rest of her negatives into a knot that will be a real challenge to unravel.

     For the first time, it appears that Trump might succeed in his Cinderella campaign for the presidency, which at its outset was derided almost unanimously by the political press. He wasn’t my preferred candidate – I was a Ted Cruz supporter – but he’s preferable to Clinton by a considerable margin. Therefore: Yay!