Summer is over. Labor Day has past.  And now, says conventional wisdom, is when people start paying attention to the election.

So where are we?

Well, we were all greeted this morning with a bunch of polls, including a 50-state poll from NBC/SurveyMonkey.  Several of them are grabbing headlines, most notably, the CNN/ORC poll (rated A- by 538.com) which has Trump up nationally by +2.  And that is likely voters (more accurate than registered voters).

The SurveyMonkey poll (registered voters; rated C- by 538.com) gives Clinton a +4 lead nationally.  She seems to be doing well in most swing states, although Michigan, North Carolina and Georgia are close.  And…. get this… it has the candidates tied in Texas.

When you step back and look at these polls in the aggregate, one thing is for sure… Hillary’s post-convention lead of 7-8 points has definitely evaporated.

What do the election prediction sites say?  This:

And actually, 538 has revised its forecast to 68.5% Dem.

So…. still good, not great.  There are about 248 electoral votes in Hillary’s pocket, compared to only 111 in Donald’s.  That leaves 179 from 13 competitive states.  Since the magic number is 270, Clinton needs only 22 EVs from 13 contested states.

Nate Silver says that although things are still favoring Hillary, there is a high amount of uncertainty at this point:

Higher than people might assume. Between the unusually early conventions and the late election — Nov. 8 is the latest possible date on which Election Day can occur — it’s a long campaign this year. But just as important, many voters — close to 20 percent — either say they’re undecided or that they plan to vote for third-party candidates. At a comparable point four years ago, only 5 to 10 percent of voters fell into those categories.

High numbers of undecided and third-party voters are associated with higher volatility and larger polling errors. Put another way, elections are harder to predict when fewer people have made up their minds. Because FiveThirtyEight’s models account for this property, we show a relatively wide range of possible outcomes, giving Trump better odds of winning than most other statistically based models, but also a significant chance of a Clinton landslide if those undecideds break in her favor.

So what does he think Clinton should worry about?

My first question would be whether the race has settled into a 4-point Clinton lead, as the polls have it now, or is continuing to trend toward Trump. If I’m still ahead by 4 points or more at the time of the first debate on Sept. 26, I’ll feel reasonably good about my position: A Trump comeback would be toward the outer edges of how much trailing candidates have historically been able to move the polls with the debates. If the race gets much closer, though, my list of concerns gets a lot longer. It would include geopolitical events that could work in Trump’s favor, third-party candidates who seem to be taking more votes from me than from Trump, and the tendency for incumbent candidates (since Clinton is a quasi-incumbent) to lose ground in the polls after the first debate.

And what should Trump worry about?

As the polls have ebbed and flowed, I’ve been 8 or 10 points behind Clinton at my worst moments, but only tied with her at my best moments. I’ve also never gotten much above 40 percent in national polls, at least not on a consistent basis, and I’ve alienated a lot of voters who would allow me to climb higher than that. In other words, maybe that dreaded Trump ceiling is there after all, in which case I’ll have to get awfully lucky to win the election, probably needing both a favorable flow of news in the weeks leading up to Nov. 8 and a large third-party vote that works against Clinton.

As for me, I worry about the press coverage.  Clinton had a coughing fit last night, and the media treated it like she was on her deathbed.  Seriously, that LEAD the news on NBC today.

I keep telling myself that the debates are really where it is at.  But a lot of it is expectations.  The bar for Trump is on the floor.  As long as he doesn’t urinate on Clinton, some will say he is “presidential”.  The media again is totally skewing this thing.