“Barack Obama is about to launch a presidential campaign blitz for Hillary Clinton unprecedented in the modern era, pledging a dramatic commitment of time and resources to a contest he now unabashedly frames as a referendum on his personal and political prestige,” Bloomberg reports.

“Obama plans to devote at least one to two days each week in October to campaign for Clinton through rallies, targeted radio and television interviews, social media outreach and fundraising, said an adviser who requested anonymity.”

A new NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll finds Hillary Clinton leading Donald Trump by five points among likely voters, 50% to 45%.

“President Obama is approaching the final weeks of the presidential campaign with an intense sense of urgency and concern amid a growing realization that the election could be determined by the narrowest of margins,” the Washington Post reports.

“Earlier this year, Obama seemed to regard the defeat of GOP nominee Donald Trump as a near inevitability, but in recent days the president has changed his tone.”

Donald Trump “is saying ‘yes’ to Fox News almost every day but saying ‘no’ to most other major networks and news organizations — a highly unusual strategy for a presidential nominee,” CNN reports.

“Rousing the base instead of reaching out to undecided voters may ultimately pay off for Trump. If nothing else, it limits the candidate’s exposure to hard-hitting questions — while fueling frustration among journalists.”

A new Morning Consult poll finds that nearly 75% of the registered voters plans to watch the first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton next week.

When asked who they think will win the debate, 37% picked Clinton and 31% chose Trump while 32% either didn’t know or had no opinion.

Sean Trende: “To be sure, Clinton did not want the polls to tighten. At the same time, this was a particularly awful series of news cycles for her, while Trump had managed to go over a month without reprising some of his more polarizing statements, such as his flap with the Khan family, who lost a son in Iraq. We would expect a big swing in the polls, and there was one.”

“But it did not put Trump over the top.  A week in, she still leads by 0.7 points in the four-way RCP average, and 0.9 points in the two-way average. She maintains a lead in the Electoral College, and while North Carolina and Nevada appear to be close, her lead in the next-most-Republican state, Virginia (which would put Trump over the 270 mark), is 3.5 points.”

“In other words, a truly terrible news cycle was still not enough to put Trump ahead.  In a strange way, that’s good news for Clinton.”

Los Angeles Times: “The voter expectations question is important because it often — although not always — has proved a more accurate way to forecast elections than asking which candidate a person plans to vote for. The expectations question has an especially good track record when an election remains a ways off — seven weeks in this case.”

“Clinton leads 50% to 45% on the question of which candidate people expect will win, the Daybreak poll finds. That’s down from her 13-point lead just a week ago.”

Here are the latest state polls from the presidential race:

Florida: Clinton 41%, Trump 40% (NYT/Siena)

Georgia: Trump 45%,Clinton 42% (Monmouth)

“I know that presidential races can get intense. I know that people can sometimes say things they won’t mean. But Donald Trump has repeatedly invited his followers to commit a terrible act of violence on his opponents. He has invited them to kill another human being more than once.”

— Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), quoted by the Washington Post.