Here are the latest state polls from the presidential race:

North Carolina: Clinton 42%, Trump 42% (Civitas)

Texas: Trump 39%, Clinton 32% (Texas Lyceum)

Ohio: Trump 42%, Clinton 39% (Suffolk)

Virginia: Clinton 40%, Trump 37% (University of Mary Washington)

Iowa: Trump 45%, Clinton 37% (Monmouth)

Michigan: Clinton 42%, Trump 38% (Michigan Free Press)

Colorado: Trump 42%, Clinton 38% (Emerson)

Georgia: Trump 46%, Clinton 42% (Opinion Savvy)

Amy Walter: “My advice to making sense of all the strum and churn over the next 50+ days: keep an eye on Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. If Clinton holds onto those two states (as well as all the other states Obama carried in 2012 like Wisconsin and Michigan), she can lose Iowa, Nevada, Ohio, Florida and ME-02 and still win by a narrow 272-266.”

The HuffPost Pollster averages show Clinton up in Pennsylvania, 45% to 38%, and leading in New Hampshire, 42% to 37%.

Matthew Yglesias: “Lambasting Trump while being unpopular herself would be a clear winning strategy in a zero-sum head-to-head race. But in a four-sided race, where the two lesser candidates aren’t receiving much scrutiny from the press or the campaigns, it tends to have the side consequence of pressing a lot of people to Johnson or Stein. The fact that there are two different third-party candidates in the race — one for people who think Clinton’s too left and one for people who think she’s not left enough — makes it really difficult to avoid bleeding voters.”

“If polls stay very tight or Trump pulls into a lead, then anti-Trump messaging to Johnson and Stein voters could take the form of classic warnings about spoilers and wasted votes. But the fact that Clinton has been consistently leading in the polls — and in August was doing so by a large margin — has itself undercut purely tactical arguments for voting Clinton. If she is overwhelmingly likely to win, which is what people have been hearing, then you may as well not vote for her if you don’t like her.”

“It’s simply going to be very hard for Clinton to open up the kind of stable lead that her supporters think Trump’s awfulness deserves while she herself is so little-liked.”

David Wasserman: “I don’t dispute its assessment that Hillary Clinton has a 63 or 64 percent chance of winning the election. That said, in the event this race does tighten to a coin flip by Nov. 8, there is an unusually high chance Donald Trump could win the Electoral College while losing the popular vote — basically, Democrats’ version of the apocalypse.”

“Here’s why: Several of Trump’s worst demographic groups happen to be concentrated in states, such as California, New York, Texas and Utah, that are either not competitive or that aren’t on Trump’s must-win list. Conversely, whites without a college degree — one of Trump’s strongest groups — represent a huge bloc in three blue states he would need to turn red to have the best chance of winning 270 electoral votes: Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania.”

A new Quinnipiac poll shows that American likely voters say by a 62% to 38% that Hillary Clinton is qualified to be president, but by a 61% to 38% margin that Donald Trump is not.

James Fallows has a must-read piece on the upcoming presidential debates:

“If the sound-off image is of a calm, confident Clinton and a fuming Trump, she will have won the debates and moved that much closer to winning the election. But if Trump can seem easily rather than angrily in command, or if he can lure Clinton into joining him in an insult-for-insult exchange, or if she is beset by some new controversy for which she gives a hyper-legalistic rationalization, then the debates could be a turning point for Trump. … If he seems better than expected, either by throwing Clinton off her game or appearing calmer than a wound-up opponent who gives a dense six-point answer to every question, he might achieve something similar to Reagan’s ‘There you go again!’”

A potential strategy for Clinton:

“Most people I spoke with recommended a picador-like mocking approach, designed not to confront Trump directly but to cumulatively provoke him into an outburst. … When Comedy Central hosted a roast of Trump five years ago, he didn’t seem to object to jokes about his hair, about his weight, even about his lecherous remarks regarding his daughter Ivanka. The one subject he nixed, according to Aaron Lee, a writer for the roast, was ‘any joke that suggests Trump is not actually as wealthy as he claims to be.’ So this is a scab Hillary Clinton should deftly pick.”

“Right now, it’s the party of Trump.  He’s the Republican nominee for president of the United States and gotten more votes than any Republican candidate for president in our history, and with 16 opponents.  So, it’s the party of Trump.”

— Gov. Chris Christie, in an interview on MSNBC.

When asked why his father has not released his tax returns as presidential candidates have traditionally done, Donald Trump Jr. told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, “Because he’s got a 12,000-page tax return that would create… financial auditors out of every person in the country asking questions that would detract from (his father’s) main message.”

“Clinton Releases Health Stats to Public, Trump to Dr. Oz”

— NBC News, September 15, 2016