Comey might have done it for Trump. As intended, and maybe even as planned and colluded.

US election 2016: what you need to know before voting Clinton or Trump

That's one heck of a slide into pessimism for 538, just over the last week.

Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight model gives Clinton a 65% chance of winning to Donald Trump’s 35%, while the New York Times sticks its neck out with an 86% chance of a Clinton presidency to 14% for Trump. 

RealClearPolitics’ polling average has Clinton ahead by 1.7 percentage points, while HuffPost Pollster’s average gives her a 5.5 percentage point lead.

Amid this dense electoral fog, what is clear is that Comey’s bombshell last Friday that the FBI is in a sense reviving its probe into Clinton’s use of a private email server when she was US secretary of state has had a profound impact on the race. 

It allowed Trump, until then mired in his own controversy over his attitudes towards women, to swing the spotlight back onto his rival’s perceived untrustworthiness. 

Probably as a result, the Republican nominee’s plummeting poll ratings have rallied, bringing them within the margin of error both on a national measure and in key states such as Florida, and even propelling him into the lead in the bellwether state of Ohio.