Should Democrat Clinton, 69, defeat Republican Donald Trump, 70, in Tuesday's election, she would become the first woman elected U.S. president, having already been the only first lady to win elected office and the first woman nominated for president by a major U.S. party.

Clinton fell short in her first presidential bid in 2008, losing her party's nomination to Barack Obama.

Her time on the American political scene has come during an era of intense partisanship and gaping divisions in U.S. society. Americans hold dramatically differing views of Clinton.

Clinton's admirers consider her a tough, capable and sometimes inspirational leader who has endured unrelenting efforts by political enemies to chop her down. Her detractors consider her an unscrupulous and power-hungry opportunist.

Clinton entered the 2016 race as her party's odds-on favorite, but was an establishment figure, the ultimate insider with decades of political baggage, at a time when voters seemed enamored with outsiders. She staved off an unexpectedly stiff challenge from U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, who describes himself as a democratic socialist, to claim the Democratic nomination in July.

For decades Clinton has battled conservatives and Republican adversaries and weathered controversies including her husband Bill Clinton's infidelity, a failed Republican effort to remove him from office, investigations into past business dealings and her use of a private email server as secretary of state. She famously complained in 1998 during her husband's presidency about a "vast right-wing conspiracy."

Many Democrats back her for championing women's rights at home and abroad, social justice and access to healthcare, but opinion polls show a majority of U.S. voters do not trust her. [polling.reuters.com/#!poll/TM752Y15_2]

Against Trump, she portrayed her candidacy as a bulwark against a unique threat that she said the real estate developer posed to American democracy.

As President Obama's secretary of state from 2009 to 2013, she grappled with civil wars in Syria and Libya, Iran's nuclear program, China's growing clout, Russian assertiveness, ending the Iraq war, winding down the Afghanistan war, and an unsuccessful bid to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Clinton was already running for president when, during a testy 11-hour congressional hearing in October 2015, she deflected Republican criticism of her handling of a 2012 attack by militants in Benghazi, Libya in which the U.S. ambassador died.

That hearing and another in January 2013 while she was still secretary of state focused on allegations of State Department security lapses related to the attack.

A mistrust of rivals and the media has long prompted Clinton to keep her guard up.

"The truth is, through all these years of public service, the 'service' part has always come easier to me than the 'public' part," Clinton said in accepting the 2016 Democratic nomination. "I get it that some people just don't know what to make of me."

At the same convention, Obama cited her years of experience and said, "There has never been a man or woman, not me, not Bill - nobody more qualified than Hillary Clinton to serve as president of the United States."

Republicans have accused Clinton of breaking the law while corresponding through a private email server as secretary of state. In July, FBI Director James Comey called Clinton "extremely careless" in her handling of classified information by email, but Obama's Justice Department accepted his recommendation not to bring criminal charges.

"If I had to do it over again, I would, obviously, do it differently," Clinton said during a Sept. 26 debate with Trump, referring to her use of the private server as a "mistake" for which she took responsibility.

The controversy flared again on Oct. 28 when Comey told U.S. lawmakers the FBI was investigating a new trove of emails as part of its probe, but said their significance was unclear.

Trump seized on the probe into Clinton's email, deriding her as "Crooked Hillary," saying he would seek to put her behind bars if elected and encouraging his supporters to chant "lock her up."

Clinton portrayed Trump as a racist hate-monger, a sexist and a tax-dodger enamored with Russian President Vladimir Putin and unfit to serve as president and commander in chief.

"Such a nasty woman," Trump retorted during their Oct. 19 debate when she suggested he would try to get out of paying the higher taxes she advocates for the wealthy.

Born in Chicago on Oct. 26, 1947, Hillary Rodham Clinton was the eldest of three children of a small-business owner father she called a "rock-ribbed, up-by-your-bootstraps, conservative Republican" and a mother who was a closet Democrat.

She said she inherited her father's distinctive laugh - she called it "a big rolling guffaw" - and Americans have heard it frequently.

She attended public schools, then enrolled in 1965 at all-female Wellesley College in Massachusetts, where she headed the Young Republicans Club.

In a Wellesley commencement address, she seized the spotlight by starting her speech with extemporaneous remarks challenging comments made by the preceding speaker, a U.S. senator.

Her political views changed during the 1960s civil rights struggles and Vietnam War escalation. She attended the 1968 Republican convention that nominated Richard Nixon, but soon became a Democrat.

At Yale Law School, she met a similarly ambitious fellow student from Arkansas, Bill Clinton, and they became a couple. She moved to Washington to work for a congressional panel in the impeachment drive against Nixon, who resigned as president in 1974 during the Watergate scandal.

She moved to Arkansas to be with Bill, married him in 1975, and was hired by a top law firm. He jumped into politics, eventually being elected governor, at age 32, in 1978. She gave birth to the couple's only child, daughter Chelsea, in 1980.

As Arkansas' first lady, she was a high-powered lawyer in the capital Little Rock and a Wal-Mart corporate board member.

Most Americans were introduced to her during her husband's bid for the 1992 Democratic presidential nomination. Bill Clinton said voters would get "two for the price of one" if they elected him. She unapologetically said she was not a woman who "stayed home and baked cookies."

After a woman named Gennifer Flowers accused Bill Clinton during the campaign of a sexual affair, Hillary Clinton appeared on TV with her husband and referred to singer Tammy Wynette's song, "Stand by Your Man."

"You know, I'm not sitting here, some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette," she said, adding that she loved and respected her husband. "And you know, if that's not enough for people, then heck, don't vote for him," she added.

Conservative critics painted her as a radical feminist and a threat to traditional family values.

Bill Clinton defeated incumbent Republican President George H.W. Bush in November 1992. As first lady from 1993 to 2001, she was unusually exertive, diving into policy matters unlike many of her predecessors.

Critics assailed her failed effort to win congressional passage of healthcare reform, deriding it as "Hillarycare."

At a 1995 U.N. conference in China on women, she declared that "human rights are women's rights and women's rights are human rights."

She and her husband faced a long investigation into past business dealings but ultimately no criminal charges were brought. A real estate venture known as Whitewater faced scrutiny, spawning an independent counsel investigation that later encompassed Bill Clinton's sexual relationship with a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky.

Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster, a figure in the Whitewater controversy and a close friend of the Clintons from Arkansas, was found dead of a gunshot in 1993. His death was ruled a suicide. In a 2003 memoir, Hillary Clinton blasted "conspiracy theorists and investigators trying to prove that Vince was murdered to cover up what he 'knew about Whitewater.'"

In 2000, the independent counsel investigation concluded there was insufficient evidence to show the Clintons had been involved in any criminal behavior related to Whitewater.

In December 1998, the Republican-led House of Representatives voted to impeach a president for only the second time in U.S. history, charging Bill Clinton with "high crimes and misdemeanors" for allegedly lying under oath and obstructing justice to cover up his relationship with Lewinsky.

The Republican-led Senate acquitted Clinton in February 1999. Hillary Clinton called the impeachment an abuse of power by Republicans with a "Soviet-style show trial" and condemned what she called "an attempted congressional coup d'etat."

She also said she "wanted to wring Bill's neck" for the affair and upbraided him privately. Ultimately, she said, she decided she still loved him and remained after they went through counseling.

"All I know is that no one understands me better and no one can make me laugh the way Bill does," she wrote in her 2003 book "Living History."

Hillary Clinton soon launched her own bid for elected office. She bought a house in the town of Chappaqua to officially become a New York resident. She won election as a U.S. senator the same month her husband left office in January 2001. She served until 2009.

She entered the race for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination as the front-runner, but then-senator Obama won the party's nomination and beat Republican John McCain to become the first black president.

In 2016, Obama campaigned vigorously for her against Trump.

"What sets Hillary apart is that through it all, she just keeps on going, and she doesn't stop caring, and she doesn't stop trying. And she never stops fighting for us, even if we haven't always appreciated it," Obama told a September rally.</s>Fox News anchor apologizes for false report of 'likely' Clinton indictment

CLOSE The host had been referring to an FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation. Newslook

Fox News anchor Bret Baier apologized on air Friday for his report that Hillary Clinton faces a "likely" indictment as the result of a federal investigation into the Clinton Foundation and for his report that Clinton's private email server had been hacked by five foreign intelligence agencies.

Both of Baier's mistaken reports were made Wednesday night in an appearance with Fox News Channel's Brit Hume. At the time, Baier said the information was based on "two separate sources with intimate knowledge of the FBI investigations into the Clinton emails and the Clinton Foundation."

Baier "clarified" his reporting Friday on the Fox News show Happening Now, hosted by Jon Scott.

"On the hacking of Clinton's private, unsecured server: While multiple sources believe and are operating under the working assumption that the server has been hacked, and some had specific quotes to that belief, there are to this day no digital fingerprints of such breaches," Baier said Friday on the Fox News show Happening Now, hosted by Jon Scott.

Baier admitted the report was based on a single, anonymous source.

He then said his statement that an indictment was "likely" in the investigation into the Clinton Foundation was a "mistake." Baier had already backtracked somewhat the previous night, calling the wording "inartful."

"Well, that just wasn't inartful, it was a mistake and for that I'm sorry," Baier said. "I should have said they will continue to build their case. Indictment obviously is a very loaded word, John, especially in this atmosphere and no one knows if there would or would not be an indictment no matter how strong investigators feel their evidence is."

Several news organizations reported Thursday that Baier's assertion was incorrect.

Baier stood by his report that there is an ongoing FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation that began more than a year ago.

Republican nominee Donald Trump has used Baier's incorrect reporting in his campaign speeches. He repeated the claim that "FBI agents says their investigation is likely to yield an indictment" on Friday, despite Baier's apology.

The FBI has drawn heavy criticism for repeated leaks about the Clinton investigations, including from President Obama who said Thursday, "we don't operate on innuendo, we don't operate on incomplete information, we don't operate on leaks."

Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2f2pV9m</s>Should Democrat Clinton, 69, defeat Republican Donald Trump, 70, in Tuesday's election, she would become the first woman elected U.S. president, having already been the only first lady to win elected office and the first woman nominated for president by a major U.S. party.

Clinton fell short in her first presidential bid in 2008, losing her party's nomination to Barack Obama.

Her time on the American political scene has come during an era of intense partisanship and gaping divisions in U.S. society. Americans hold dramatically differing views of Clinton.

Clinton's admirers consider her a tough, capable and sometimes inspirational leader who has endured unrelenting efforts by political enemies to chop her down. Her detractors consider her an unscrupulous and power-hungry opportunist.

Clinton entered the 2016 race as her party's odds-on favorite, but was an establishment figure, the ultimate insider with decades of political baggage, at a time when voters seemed enamored with outsiders. She staved off an unexpectedly stiff challenge from U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, who describes himself as a democratic socialist, to claim the Democratic nomination in July.

For decades Clinton has battled conservatives and Republican adversaries and weathered controversies including her husband Bill Clinton's infidelity, a failed Republican effort to remove him from office, investigations into past business dealings and her use of a private email server as secretary of state. She famously complained in 1998 during her husband's presidency about a "vast right-wing conspiracy."

Many Democrats back her for championing women's rights at home and abroad, social justice and access to healthcare, but opinion polls show a majority of U.S. voters do not trust her. [polling.reuters.com/#!poll/TM752Y15_2]

Against Trump, she portrayed her candidacy as a bulwark against a unique threat that she said the real estate developer posed to American democracy.

As President Obama's secretary of state from 2009 to 2013, she grappled with civil wars in Syria and Libya, Iran's nuclear program, China's growing clout, Russian assertiveness, ending the Iraq war, winding down the Afghanistan war, and an unsuccessful bid to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Clinton was already running for president when, during a testy 11-hour congressional hearing in October 2015, she deflected Republican criticism of her handling of a 2012 attack by militants in Benghazi, Libya in which the U.S. ambassador died.

That hearing and another in January 2013 while she was still secretary of state focused on allegations of State Department security lapses related to the attack.

A mistrust of rivals and the media has long prompted Clinton to keep her guard up.

"The truth is, through all these years of public service, the 'service' part has always come easier to me than the 'public' part," Clinton said in accepting the 2016 Democratic nomination. "I get it that some people just don't know what to make of me."

At the same convention, Obama cited her years of experience and said, "There has never been a man or woman, not me, not Bill - nobody more qualified than Hillary Clinton to serve as president of the United States."

Republicans have accused Clinton of breaking the law while corresponding through a private email server as secretary of state. In July, FBI Director James Comey called Clinton "extremely careless" in her handling of classified information by email, but Obama's Justice Department accepted his recommendation not to bring criminal charges.

"If I had to do it over again, I would, obviously, do it differently," Clinton said during a Sept. 26 debate with Trump, referring to her use of the private server as a "mistake" for which she took responsibility.

The controversy flared again on Oct. 28 when Comey told U.S. lawmakers the FBI was investigating a new trove of emails as part of its probe, but said their significance was unclear.

Trump seized on the probe into Clinton's email, deriding her as "Crooked Hillary," saying he would seek to put her behind bars if elected and encouraging his supporters to chant "lock her up."

Clinton portrayed Trump as a racist hate-monger, a sexist and a tax-dodger enamored with Russian President Vladimir Putin and unfit to serve as president and commander in chief.

"Such a nasty woman," Trump retorted during their Oct. 19 debate when she suggested he would try to get out of paying the higher taxes she advocates for the wealthy.

Born in Chicago on Oct. 26, 1947, Hillary Rodham Clinton was the eldest of three children of a small-business owner father she called a "rock-ribbed, up-by-your-bootstraps, conservative Republican" and a mother who was a closet Democrat.

She said she inherited her father's distinctive laugh - she called it "a big rolling guffaw" - and Americans have heard it frequently.

She attended public schools, then enrolled in 1965 at all-female Wellesley College in Massachusetts, where she headed the Young Republicans Club.

In a Wellesley commencement address, she seized the spotlight by starting her speech with extemporaneous remarks challenging comments made by the preceding speaker, a U.S. senator.

Her political views changed during the 1960s civil rights struggles and Vietnam War escalation. She attended the 1968 Republican convention that nominated Richard Nixon, but soon became a Democrat.

At Yale Law School, she met a similarly ambitious fellow student from Arkansas, Bill Clinton, and they became a couple. She moved to Washington to work for a congressional panel in the impeachment drive against Nixon, who resigned as president in 1974 during the Watergate scandal.

She moved to Arkansas to be with Bill, married him in 1975, and was hired by a top law firm. He jumped into politics, eventually being elected governor, at age 32, in 1978. She gave birth to the couple's only child, daughter Chelsea, in 1980.

As Arkansas' first lady, she was a high-powered lawyer in the capital Little Rock and a Wal-Mart corporate board member.

Most Americans were introduced to her during her husband's bid for the 1992 Democratic presidential nomination. Bill Clinton said voters would get "two for the price of one" if they elected him. She unapologetically said she was not a woman who "stayed home and baked cookies."

After a woman named Gennifer Flowers accused Bill Clinton during the campaign of a sexual affair, Hillary Clinton appeared on TV with her husband and referred to singer Tammy Wynette's song, "Stand by Your Man."

"You know, I'm not sitting here, some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette," she said, adding that she loved and respected her husband. "And you know, if that's not enough for people, then heck, don't vote for him," she added.

Conservative critics painted her as a radical feminist and a threat to traditional family values.

Bill Clinton defeated incumbent Republican President George H.W. Bush in November 1992. As first lady from 1993 to 2001, she was unusually exertive, diving into policy matters unlike many of her predecessors.

Critics assailed her failed effort to win congressional passage of healthcare reform, deriding it as "Hillarycare."

At a 1995 U.N. conference in China on women, she declared that "human rights are women's rights and women's rights are human rights."

She and her husband faced a long investigation into past business dealings but ultimately no criminal charges were brought. A real estate venture known as Whitewater faced scrutiny, spawning an independent counsel investigation that later encompassed Bill Clinton's sexual relationship with a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky.

Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster, a figure in the Whitewater controversy and a close friend of the Clintons from Arkansas, was found dead of a gunshot in 1993. His death was ruled a suicide. In a 2003 memoir, Hillary Clinton blasted "conspiracy theorists and investigators trying to prove that Vince was murdered to cover up what he 'knew about Whitewater.'"

In 2000, the independent counsel investigation concluded there was insufficient evidence to show the Clintons had been involved in any criminal behavior related to Whitewater.

In December 1998, the Republican-led House of Representatives voted to impeach a president for only the second time in U.S. history, charging Bill Clinton with "high crimes and misdemeanors" for allegedly lying under oath and obstructing justice to cover up his relationship with Lewinsky.

The Republican-led Senate acquitted Clinton in February 1999. Hillary Clinton called the impeachment an abuse of power by Republicans with a "Soviet-style show trial" and condemned what she called "an attempted congressional coup d'etat."

She also said she "wanted to wring Bill's neck" for the affair and upbraided him privately. Ultimately, she said, she decided she still loved him and remained after they went through counseling.

"All I know is that no one understands me better and no one can make me laugh the way Bill does," she wrote in her 2003 book "Living History."

Hillary Clinton soon launched her own bid for elected office. She bought a house in the town of Chappaqua to officially become a New York resident. She won election as a U.S. senator the same month her husband left office in January 2001. She served until 2009.

She entered the race for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination as the front-runner, but then-senator Obama won the party's nomination and beat Republican John McCain to become the first black president.

In 2016, Obama campaigned vigorously for her against Trump.

"What sets Hillary apart is that through it all, she just keeps on going, and she doesn't stop caring, and she doesn't stop trying. And she never stops fighting for us, even if we haven't always appreciated it," Obama told a September rally.</s>Hillary Clinton, in what was likely her final visit to Southern Nevada before the Tuesday election, told supporters that she endeavored to be a candidate who gives people someone to vote for, rather than simply collecting votes from people voting against her rival.

At which point she asked her audience to imagine how truly horrible a Donald Trump presidency might be by conjuring a comprehensive laundry basket of deplorables that omitted only the angel’s trumpet, bowls of wrath and four horsemen.

Trump demeans women, mocks the disabled, promises to round up immigrants (technically, criminal illegal immigrants), criticizes an American judge because of his Mexican heritage, speaks of black people leading lives exclusively of poverty and despair, intends to ban Muslims from the United States, thinks wages are too high, once fought union organization at his Las Vegas hotel, stiffs contractors on his projects, says hotheaded things about war and foreign policy, insults a Gold Star family and won’t even say whether he’ll accept the results of the election.

And they say Clinton doesn’t have the stamina to be president.

“As you talk to people and urge them to come out to vote, remind them of what’s at stake,” Clinton said. “Everything.”

Surely, this was not the speech Clinton wanted to give this late in the race, especially in a state in which she ought to be comfortably ahead such as Nevada. (As of Wednesday, Democrats were leading Republicans in early and mail-in voting by a margin of 42 percent to nearly 37 percent, a difference in real votes of more than 33,000 out of more than 622,000 cast, according to the secretary of state’s office.)

But things are tightening up, locally and nationally. A race that held Clinton comfortably ahead has begun to narrow. So Clinton has scrapped a “don’t stop thinking about tomorrow” closing speech in favor of the very thing she said she didn’t want: a campaign highlighting the relative evils of her foe.

There are worse things, of course. Clinton is correct in many, if not most, of her deprecating remarks about Trump and his personal and political style. You can almost hear the frustration and amazement in her voice when she even mouths aloud the possibility that Trump could still win the White House if enough Clinton voters fail to show up to the polls. No wonder she’s heading to friendly states and asking friendly audiences to reach out to their friends and family and get every single eligible voter to the polls.

You can almost see her trying to take a baseball bat to the notion that if Trump were to be entrusted with the White House, the awesome responsibility of the office would somehow transform him from a selfish, narcissistic blowhard to a humble, shrewd statesman. (To be sure, many of Trump’s most ardent supporters would consider such a transformation to be a bad thing.)

And it’s not just Clinton courting the Silver State late in the game. Trump announced Wednesday he’d be in Reno on Saturday for a visit to Nevada’s critical swing county (Republicans outnumber Democrats there only by slightly more than 3,600 voters). And his son, Donald Trump Jr., visited Las Vegas on Thursday for a quick speech at Ahern Manufacturing.

Trump doesn’t need the White House, his son said in remarks. He wants it because he loves the American dream.

Odd, isn’t it, how so many American dreams of aspiring to greater heights end up at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?

Four more days to go, folks. Today’s the last day to early vote, so do so now, or do it on Tuesday.

Steve Sebelius is a Review-Journal political columnist. Follow him on Twitter (@SteveSebelius) or reach him at 702-387-5276 or SSebelius@reviewjournal.com.</s>ATLANTA (AP) — With Hillary Clinton’s lead narrowing recently, the Democrat’s path to the Oval Office appears to rest where it did at the outset — a retooled version of the alliance that twice elected President Barack Obama.

Her aides are calling it “the Hillary coalition,” rather than “the Obama coalition,” distinguished by her dependence on an apparent surge of Hispanic voters, while Obama set records for African-American turnout. But the foundations remain the same: nonwhite voters, millennials and women. Even some Republicans acknowledge that still gives Clinton an advantage over Donald Trump in an increasingly diverse country.

“Everything we are doing is reaching out to our core coalition,” said Clinton aide Marlon Marshall.

Clinton’s battleground blitz involves a bit of everything: 45 million phone calls and door-knocks in targeted neighborhoods; massive rallies with Barack and Michelle Obama in North Carolina and elsewhere; concerts with celebrities in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Trump maintains his confidence, energizing conservatives and working-class whites with sharpened attacks on Clinton as a corrupt front for an unpopular political establishment. He’s been buoyed by the FBI’s revelations that agents are still eyeing Clinton’s handling of classified national security material when she led the State Department.

In New Hampshire this past week, he warned electing Clinton “would create an unprecedented constitutional crisis.” And he’s mocking Clinton’s celebrity lineups: “I am here all by myself. Just me. No guitar, no piano, no nothing.”

Chris Carr, the Republican National Committee’s political director, said Trump is “rapidly closing in states which pundits said were out of reach just a few weeks ago.” Yet Clinton’s aides and more than a few Republicans still argue that she retains the upper hand, given the diversity in many battleground states key to amassing the 270 electoral votes required to win.

GOP pollster Whit Ayres said Trump’s bounce reflects Republican voters who’ve reluctantly decided to support him. “But what that does,” Ayres said, “is bring us back to the structural advantages … the Democrats enjoy, and will continue to enjoy until my side figures out how to deal with a rapidly changing America.”

Just a few weeks ago, Clinton emerged from her final debate against Trump contemplating a wide popular vote margin, not to mention a big Electoral College win. She and Michelle Obama campaigned in Arizona, usually a GOP stronghold, and her campaign ballyhooed new spending in Missouri, Indiana and elsewhere. Democrats talked openly of sweeping gains in the House and Senate.

Then FBI Director James Comey disclosed his agency was scouring a newly discovered cache of emails that may or may not produce relevant information about how Clinton handled classified State Department materials. Ayres said Comey’s vague letter to congressional Republican leaders was enough for Trump to shift the focus away from his treatment of women and other controversies and remind GOP voters why they so detest Clinton.

The confidence in Trump’s camp notwithstanding, Republicans are left with a familiar conundrum. Four years ago, Mitt Romney won about six out of 10 white voters nationally. That’s roughly the same proportion that George H.W. Bush notched in 1988. The difference was a much whiter electorate: Bush won 426 electoral votes and 41 states; Romney won 24 states good for just 206 electoral votes.

Trump’s appeal among white voters may be enough to flip states like Iowa, which is more than 90 percent white, and Ohio, where Obama lost ground with white voters from his 2008 election and needed a spike in black turnout to pad his 160,000-vote statewide margin.

But Robby Mook, Clinton’s campaign manager, said that still leaves Clinton with a “firewall” in places like North Carolina, Florida and Nevada, where early voting suggests an increase in Hispanic and Asian-American voting and strong support among African-Americans, even after the president warned the black vote was “not where it needs to be.” Marshall, chief of Clinton’s state-based campaign organizations, said those early returns are the results of a massive campaign operation that’s been building for more than a year.

Marshall and Mook said their analysis also shows Clinton outpacing Trump among white millennials. Obama won young voters overall in 2012 by a wide margin, but that depended on nonwhites; he still lost narrowly among white millennials. Mook also said that even with Trump consolidating some Republican support, Clinton is getting support from white college-educated voters, particularly women, who usually back Republican presidential nominees.

Those trends could also bode well for Clinton in Pennsylvania, a Democratic stronghold that does not have early voting but offers 20 electoral votes Trump needs.</s>WASHINGTON — Hillary Clinton may be within striking distance of becoming the first woman to win the White House, now that the U.S. is in the final weeks of one of its nastiest presidential campaigns in recent history.

The former secretary of state leads rival Donald Trump in preference polls in a series of battleground states as the Republican nominee has struggled to overcome allegations of sexual misconduct against several women. But the race is far from settled.

Both Clinton and Trump have been viewed harshly by the electorate. For her part, Clinton has tried to use Trump’s provocative statements and policy proposals to make the case that he is unqualified to lead the nation.

A look at some things to know about her.

Entering the primary race as the overwhelming favorite, Clinton won the Democratic nomination after a lengthy, unexpectedly competitive battle against Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. Her general election campaign against Trump has amounted to a series of explosive exchanges: a convention dustup over a Muslim Gold Star family, Clinton’s description of Trump supporters as “deplorables,” her bout with pneumonia and collapse at a 9/11 ceremony, then her strong, momentum-shifting first debate with Trump. The revelation of an 11-year-old video in which Trump crudely said he forced himself upon women rocked the Republican’s campaign and prompted him, in retaliation, to bring forward several women who had accused former President Bill Clinton of sexual impropriety.

Clinton has been a trailblazing figure as an attorney, senator, first lady and diplomat. In Arkansas, she became the first female partner at the Rose Law Firm while Bill Clinton served as governor and acted as his key political and policy brain trust. In the White House, she helped redefine the role of first lady as a top adviser to her husband, overseeing an ill-fated health care overhaul. At the end of her husband’s second term, Clinton became the first presidential spouse to be elected to the Senate, helping secure benefits for 9/11 responders as a New York senator. Her vote for the Iraq invasion became a dividing line in her 2008 presidential primary campaign against Barack Obama and she later described her support for the war as a “mistake.” As secretary of state, she was a hawkish member of Obama’s national security team and helped set the foundation for nuclear talks with Iran.

In her campaign against Trump, Clinton has stressed her foreign policy expertise through her plans to combat the rise of the Islamic State group abroad and terrorism at home. And in recent months she has rolled out endorsements from retired generals and admirals and convened a meeting with national security experts. Clinton likes to highlight her experience, frequently telling voters about being in the Situation Room with Obama when Osama bin Laden was killed. Her foreign policy credentials have helped Clinton to cast Trump as lacking the temperament and experience to handle global affairs. She has said that Trump’s call for a temporary ban on foreign Muslims entering the U.S. and restrictions on immigration send the wrong signals to allies in an increasingly complex world.

Clinton was convincing against Trump in the first presidential debate, forcing him to defend his part in conspiracy theories about President Barack Obama’s citizenship and pressing him to release his income tax returns and recant derogatory comments about women. Trump frequently interrupted Clinton and failed to put her on the defensive about her use of a private email system. When he suggested that Clinton had been a less-than-stellar campaigner, Clinton noted that she had prepared for the debate and “prepared to be president.” The second encounter in St. Louis was among the most tense in debate history, as Trump said he would call for a special prosecutor to investigate Clinton’s email practices, telling Clinton, “you’d be in jail,” if he oversaw the Justice Department.

In the first debate, Clinton carefully laid a trap for Trump by mentioning Alicia Machado, a 1996 Miss Universe pageant winner whom Trump allegedly demeaned for gaining weight. In the days that followed, Trump kept returning to Machado again and again. The story turned damaging for Trump, as he was seen disrespecting and degrading women. An explosive “Access Hollywood” tape of Trump bragging about sexually predatory behavior followed by a series of women publicly accusing him of assault only deepened that problem. By mid-October, Trump was trailing Clinton by double-digits among female voters, setting up a gender gap difficult for any candidate to overcome.

Clinton has been dogged by the fallout from her choice to use a private server located in her home as secretary of state. A month before she announced her presidential bid, she held a news conference to address the matter. Her responses only sparked more scrutiny, raising new questions about her transmission of classified material, use of two devices and knowledge of best practices. The issue lingered long into the general election campaign, with an FBI investigation that included testimony from Clinton and several lawsuits. Republicans seized on the investigations to hammer her as untrustworthy and willing to flout the rules for personal gain. An October hack of top campaign official John Podesta’s personal account only compounded her email problems, by exposing the internal machinations of her campaign and new concerns about her policy positions. Clinton aides will not confirm or deny the veracity of the messages. If she wins in November, those issues are likely to trail her into the White House with top congressional Republicans vowing the investigations will continue and liberal Democrats concerned about her commitment to their platform.

Clinton has been battling doubts about her health ever since a troubling video emerged of her being helped into a van at a 9/11 anniversary ceremony. Her campaign kept silent for nearly eight hours before revealing she had been diagnosed with pneumonia several days earlier. After several days of rest, Clinton — age 69 on Oct. 26 — returned to campaigning. She also released additional medical information to try to reassure voters about her health. “Obviously I should have gotten some rest sooner,” she said on CNN. Trump has repeatedly questioned Clinton’s stamina. Clinton has been a more vigorous presence in battleground states in recent weeks but the episode reinforced public perceptions about Clinton’s preference for secrecy and privacy, which has contributed to a lack of trust in her candidacy.</s>MIAMI - Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton entered the last three days of campaigning in the U.S. presidential election with competing events on Saturday in Florida, a swing state that could prove decisive in Tuesday's vote.

Clinton and Trump are making their closing arguments to American voters, crisscrossing the United States in hopes of convincing last-minute undecided voters and rallying their bases to turn out enthusiastically on Election Day.

Opinion polls show Clinton still holds advantages in states that could be critical in deciding the election, but her lead has narrowed after a revelation a week ago that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was looking into a new trove of emails as part of its probe into her handling of classified information while she was secretary of state.

The state opinion polls have found Florida as one of the most competitive among the swing states - those that are hotly contested because their voters can swing either to Republicans or Democrats. The 2000 presidential election was decided in Florida after a dispute over votes and recounting of ballots went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of Republican George W. Bush over Democrat Al Gore.

The Real Clear Politics average of Florida opinion polls found Clinton with a lead of about 1 percentage point - indicating the race there is a virtual tie.

Trump held a morning rally in Tampa, Florida, where he continued to criticize Clinton for supporting the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, in the wake of announcement that premiums are going to rise next year.

"It's not going to matter because if we win I'm throwing it out anyway," Trump said.

Trump will also campaign Saturday in North Carolina, Nevada and Colorado. Trump told the crowd he will also hold a campaign event in Minnesota this weekend, although one had not previously been scheduled. His campaign confirmed a rally scheduled for Wisconsin on Sunday has been canceled. Minnesota has not voted for a Republican since 1984.

Trump repeated an attack against Clinton that he is more aggressively campaigning because she lacks "stamina."

"Look, I'm here I'm doing five or six of these a day, and Hillary goes home, she goes to sleep. If she wanted to do it, which she doesn't, she doesn't have the energy to do it, believe me," Trump said in Tampa. He had four events planned that day.

Clinton started the day by stopping by the West Miami Community Center, a Cuban American neighborhood, with telenova star Jencarlos Canela, a Miami native of Cuban descent.

She then visited her campaign's office in Little Haiti where there is a large concentration of Haitian-American residents. Clinton was joined by Sybrina Fulton, the mother of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black teenager who was shot dead in 2012 by a Sanford, Florida neighborhood watchman, George Zimmerman.

While Trump prefers large-scale rallies, Clinton has filled her campaign schedule with targeted appearances meant to court voters in specific demographics. Cuban voters have historically favored Republicans, but younger generations have shifted toward Democratic Party candidates.

Clinton will hold an afternoon rally in southern Florida then head to Philadelphia, where she will appear with pop singer Katy Perry for an evening rally. Clinton has leaned on her celebrity supporters to draw large crowds in the final days of the campaign. On Tuesday night, she appeared in Cleveland with rapper Jay-Z and singer Beyonce.

Nationally, Clinton has held her slight advantage in the opinion polls in the closing days of the campaign.

Clinton leads Trump by 5 percentage points, according to a Reuters/Ipsos tracking poll released on Friday, maintaining her advantage in the national survey even as the race tightens in several crucial swing states.

The YouGov polling estimate released on Saturday found Clinton with a 3 percentage point lead and estimated she would win 293 electoral college votes, more than the 270 needed to win the White House.

The Washington Post/ABC daily tracking poll showed Clinton ahead of Trump by 4 percentage points.

Trump has appeared to be struggling with support from his own Republican Party. Last week, Reuters/Ipsos polling found a majority of Republicans thought Clinton was going to win. This week, however, those numbers flipped and Republicans now narrowly believe he could win.

Fred Reilly, 55, a lawyer from Haines City, Florida, said attended Trump's rally in Tampa and he is concerned that not enough Republicans are rallying behind Trump. He supported U.S. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas during the primary, but now backs the New York businessman who has never previously run for political office.

"I'm extremely, and you can underline extremely, disappointed with many in the Republican Party and the way they've handled this," Reilly said of the party's response to Trump.</s>You don’t have to vote for Clinton or Trump

Contrary to what you may have heard — and I have heard it many, many times over the last few months — the presidential election is not a binary choice.

You have no obligation to choose between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. If you vote for one of the less prominent candidates, or write someone’s name where allowed, or leave the presidential line on your ballot blank, no lightning bolt will fell you and no policeman will knock on your door.

The binarists would have you believe that availing yourself of a non-Clinton, non-Trump option is a kind of escapism, a shirking of your duty to participate in the national choice between the two major candidates. The binarists who are backing Trump say that right-leaning voters who choose Gary Johnson (the Libertarian) or Evan McMullin (an independent conservative) are casting half a vote for Clinton. The binarists behind Clinton make the equivalent argument about left-leaning voters who back Johnson or Jill Stein (who is running for the Green Party) — that such a choice helps Trump.

Since Trump won the Republican nomination, a lot of the intra-conservative arguments that have appeared to be about him have really been about whether citizens should approach the vote as binarists. The pro-Trump arguments less often take the form “he would be a great president” or even “he’s really not that bad” than they do “he’s better than she is, because almost anyone would be.” And almost all of the anti-Trump conservatives who have reluctantly concluded they have to back Clinton have done so on binarist grounds.

If you accept the binarist premise about elections, both sets of arguments have merit, because Trump is preferable to Clinton in some respects and Clinton is preferable to Trump on others. And because the premise itself has some force, many millions of reasonable people are backing each candidate. But how much force it has depends on the election. It is greater the higher the stakes are in an election, and how close the vote is in a particular state.

Binarism has civic usefulness, too: A voter who believes in picking between the top two candidates will not insist on finding the perfect candidate or boycott elections on the ground that one cannot be found.

But the force of the binarist premise is radically diminished when neither candidate meets minimal standards of fitness for office for reasons of character or policy or both. Judgments about these matters will, of course, vary. In my view, candidates who lack honesty or self-control fall short of those standards. So do those who advocate the deliberate exposure of innocent human beings to lethal violence, including war crimes.

Binarists, even the best of them, almost always end up telling you that you have to cast your vote as though you were in an extremely contrived hypothetical situation: one in which the outcome of the election depends on you and yet you cannot use this awesome power to elevate a McMullin or a Stein to the presidency. Or they end up tying themselves up in knots, as in this essay arguing that not voting for Trump is tantamount to voting for Clinton while somehow “a vote for Donald Trump is not necessarily a vote for Donald Trump himself.”

An alternative to binarism would be to vote based on whether one can in good conscience wish that a candidate becomes president. If both of the top two candidates meet that criterion, vote for the better one; if neither does, then, at least as a general matter, vote for someone else. The two major parties have enough advantages in our system without our giving them a moral veto over other choices that they do not deserve.</s>Sure, at times her judgment has been flawed. But fundamentally she is a morally serious person whose passion for four decades has been to use politics to create a more just society. That’s her real conviction.

One of the great misperceptions of this political year, among many Democrats and Republicans alike, is that Hillary Clinton is a third-rate candidate with no core or convictions — oops, wrong word, but you get the point.

So in this last column before the election I want to pitch you the reasons to vote for Clinton and not just againstDonald Trump.

I’ve known Clinton a bit for many years, and I have to say: The public perception of her seems to me a gross and inaccurate caricature. I don’t understand the venom, the “lock her up” chants, the assumption that she is a Lady Macbeth; it’s an echo of the animus a lifetime ago some felt for Eleanor Roosevelt.

In fact, what makes Hillary Clinton tick has always been a 1960s-style idealism about making the world a better place.

Clinton has made thousands of compromises and innumerable mistakes, her pursuit of wealth has been unseemly and politically foolish, and it’s fair to question her judgment on everything from emails to Iraq. But understand this, too: At the core she is not a calculating crook but a smart, hardworking woman who is profoundly concerned with getting things done for those left behind.

Aside from shattering the glass ceiling for women, Clinton would bring three particular strengths to the presidency:

First, she knows the world exceptionally well and is essentially a very bright, disciplined nerd who traveled to more countries as secretary of state than any of her predecessors.

Second, Clinton had a history of playing well with Republicans when she was in the Senate and secretary of state, so there’s some small hope that we could inch back to governing.

“She is extremely well respected throughout the world, handles herself in a very classy way, and has a work ethic second to none,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, said in 2012.

Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican, described her in 2013 as “a very effective secretary of state.” Even Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, said of her in 2014, “We’re good friends.”

Polls today may show a majority of Americans have negative feelings for her, but two-thirds of Americans approved of her when she was secretary of state.

Third, Clinton cares deeply about impoverished children and others who are voiceless. In Arkansas, she started an early childhood program. In Washington, she helped establish CHIP, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which supports more than 8 million needy American kids.

One of America’s foremost needs is to address inequality and cycles of poverty. These are issues that Clinton has wrestled with for more than 40 years.

Some of you are thinking: But the emails! The foundation! Benghazi! So let’s look at the standard accusations.

Benghazi has been examined by at least eight panels, and not one uncovered major wrongdoing by Clinton. The Clinton Foundation created conflicts of interest — and saved countless lives from AIDS. Yes, Clinton appears to have set up her own email server to evade FOIA searches, which was sneaky and wrong, but State Department officials for many years routinely have conducted business on their own email accounts.

In short, the Clinton email “scandal” seems to me to be emblematic of so many Clinton “scandals”: There’s a kernel of impropriety there that in the public mind, thanks to her political enemies’ bombast, has ballooned into something unrecognizably malignant.

Of course, for many, the greater appeal of Clinton is that she’s not Trump. He simply falls outside the norms: A fraudster who seems a racist, who has cheated people not only at Trump University but regularly through his career, who boasts of sexual assaults and whom 17 women have publicly accused of improper behavior, who has flip-flopped 138 times by one count, who lies every five minutes by another, and who has less public service experience than any incoming president in history.

But my point is that this election is not just a weighing of two scoundrels; Clinton is better than that, and she is in politics because she cares about something larger than herself.

In 1993, The New York Times Magazine published a famous article about Clinton titled “Saint Hillary,” mocking her as a befuddled do-gooder trying to help the unfortunate. The article ridiculed her as naive, sanctimonious and incoherent, but it also captured something real about her earnestness and motivations.

In contrast, today’s widely held caricature of an avaricious, selfish and manipulative crook is to me just plain wrong. Sure, she compromises, she sometimes dissembles and at times her judgment has been flawed. But fundamentally she is a morally serious person whose passion for four decades has been to use politics to create a more just society. That’s her real conviction.</s>NEW YORK — Fox News Channel apologized Friday for an inaccurate report this week that Hillary Clinton would likely be indicted as a result of an investigation by the FBI into the Clinton Foundation.

Fox's Bret Baier, who initially reported on the case Wednesday, said Friday that "it was a mistake, and for that I'm sorry."

Clinton's critics have accused her family of giving donors special access to the State Department when Clinton was secretary of state.

The Associated Press reported this week that FBI agents seeking an investigation into the foundation talked to Justice Department lawyers last winter about allegations they wanted to pursue, but prosecutors were wary about the strength of the information they presented. It's unclear whether FBI agents are still looking into the foundation.

Baier began walking back his report the next day, saying that his phrasing had been inartful. "Well, that wasn't just inartful, it was a mistake," he said Friday.

"Indictment obviously is a very loaded word ... especially in this atmosphere, and no one knows if there would or would not be an indictment no matter how strong investigators feel their evidence is," he said. Baier hasn't identified the sources for his original report.

Baier also said in his original report that his sources believed with "a 99 accuracy" that Clinton's email server had been hacked by at least five foreign intelligence agencies.

He said Friday that he had one source for that information, and that while others believe that is probable, "there are still no digital fingerprints of a breach no matter what the working assumption is within the bureau."

The meeting in February about the Clinton Foundation came after the book "Clinton Cash" by Republican political consultant Peter Schweizer was published, alleging that foreign governments donating to the foundation received at the State Department while Clinton was secretary. The State Department hasn't found any ethics violations involving the foundation while Clinton was there.
Fox News apologizes to Hillary Clinton for reporting falsely of 'likely' Clinton indictment.