STATE OF THE RACE – AT 9:53 A.M. ET:  Clinton has a small edge.   The race is still competitive.  But the self-inflicted wound known as Donald Trump has not yet regained the initiative he lost with the first debate.  From The Hill:

Hillary Clinton has a small but meaningful edge over Donald Trump with a little more than five weeks to go until the election.

Clinton has moved onto firmer ground over the last week, thanks to her performance in the first primetime debate and ongoing troubles for Trump. She has led in every significant battleground state poll conducted in the debate’s aftermath.

The race remains competitive, however.

Clinton’s lead in the RealClearPolitics (RCP) national polling average is hovering between two and three percentage points. Trump still leads in the polling averages of several battleground states, including Ohio, North Carolina and Nevada. The data forecasting site FiveThirtyEight gives Trump about a one-in-three chance of prevailing.

But if Trump is to triumph, even Republicans acknowledge that their nominee will have to exert more discipline than he has shown in the past week. In a speech on Saturday night, he departed from his prepared text repeatedly, mocking Clinton's recent battle with pneumonia and saying he did not think she was "loyal" to her husband, former President Bill Clinton.

That came at the end of a week that had begun with a debate performance that drew considerable criticism and apparently halted Trump's momentum.

Even more alarming, to some Republicans, was Trump’s prolonged focus on one of the most damaging episodes from that debate, his criticism of a former Miss Universe, Alicia Machado.

At the debate, Clinton noted that Trump had once called Machado “Miss Piggy” and “Miss Housekeeping,” the latter term an apparent reference to her Latina heritage. Machado was born in Venezuela, though she is now a U.S. citizen.

COMMENT:  Trump is an amateur.  Clinton, for whom we have little regard here, is a professional.  A professional politician, that is.  She's a terrible candidate with a tin ear, but, in a debate, she knows how to present herself.  And she knows how to avoid the press.

My sense is that the debate on Sunday is make-or-break for Trump.  If he cannot regain the initiative, Clinton might well revert to her original strategy of just running out the clock, and it might work.  For a person of her mentality, it won't matter how much she wins by.  Like Obama, she'll consider one vote a mandate.  And we'll be the victims.

October 3, 2016