Trump almost caught up to Hillary in polls. Here at the Wentworth Report we’ve only been quoting the average of recent polls, as supplied by Real Clear Politics. There are many polls that produce outliers, and polls with different methodologies and different timescales, but the average of all the major polls gives a smoother and probably more accurate feel for the big picture.

Last week the Hillary health story broke through — because the knee-buckling fainting episode on 9/11 was too widely circulated o the Internet for the media to ignore (prior to that mentions of Hillary’s health problems were aggressively dismissed as a “right-wing conspiracy” by the media). It takes about a week for news to become reflected in the polls, if only because many polling organizations interview a couple of hundred of subjects each day and it takes a week to build up to the 1,400 level at which the poll uncertainty is done to about 2%.

Trump rebound fuels surge in GOP confidence, by Steven Shepard at Politico (quite PC).

For the first time since the general election kicked off, a majority of swing-state GOP insiders say Donald Trump would win their state if the election were held today. That’s according to The POLITICO Caucus — a panel of activists, strategists and operatives in 11 key battleground states. …

Republican enthusiasm for Trump has been limited throughout the campaign — and his prospects, in the eyes of GOP insiders, have been even dimmer. For most of August, only roughly one-in-five Republicans thought Trump would win. …

Now? Coming off a week that included Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” remark and her health scare in New York on Sunday, 53 percent of GOP insiders say Trump would win their state, compared to 47 percent who said Clinton would win.

Among Democrats, the vast majority, 90 percent, said they thought Clinton would win their state if the election were held today. But that’s a low-water mark for Clinton on the question: Last week, 94 percent of Democratic insiders picked Clinton, and that percentage peaked at 100 percent last month.