U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has apparently launched a plan to try to discredit Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton by attempting to make former President Bill Clinton’s sexual indiscretions a central issue of the campaign.

In an interview Friday with The New York Times, Trump said he thought the negative attacks would help him win over more female voters, two-thirds of whom view him unfavorably, according to polls.

“She’s nasty, but I can be nastier than she ever can be,” Trump said.

“Hillary Clinton was married to the single greatest abuser of women in the history of politics,” Trump said in reference to her husband, who served as president from 1993 and 2001.

“Hillary was an enabler, and she attacked the women who Bill Clinton mistreated afterward. I think it’s a serious problem for them, and it’s something that I’m considering talking about more in the near future,” Trump told the Times.

The Clinton campaign has apparently tried to pre-empt Trump’s attacks by releasing audio of Bill Clinton discussing his marriage with Hillary.

Trump’s verbal attacks come despite the fact that the first of Trump’s three marriages ended in divorce after the real estate mogul developed a relationship with the woman who eventually became his second wife.

When asked by the Times if he was ever unfaithful to his wives, Trump responded by saying, “No. I never discuss it. I never discuss it. It was never a problem.”  

Poll numbers slip

In addition to finding a way to rally from what was widely perceived by independent political analysts as a loss to Clinton during Monday’s presidential debate, Trump is trying to regain ground he has since lost to Clinton in the polls.

Clinton leads Trump by an average of 3 percentage points among likely voters nationwide, according to RealClearPolitics. The latest poll, released Friday by Fox News, confirmed Clinton’s 3-point edge in a four-way matchup. The poll, conducted over a three-day period after Monday’s debate, showed Clinton leading Trump 43 percent to 40 percent. That represented a 1-percentage-point increase over the previous Fox News poll conducted in mid-September, prior to Monday’s debate.

Another recent poll showed most people who supported third-party presidential candidates were not completely committed to them, suggesting that a shift in their support toward Clinton or Trump could significantly alter the dynamics of the race. An Associated Press-GfK poll found that nearly 70 percent of third-party supporters said they could still change their minds. These voters were about evenly split between leaning toward Trump or Clinton.

With the November 8 presidential election about five weeks away, the presidential candidates are approaching the final stretch of what has been a grueling campaign season.

Trump was on the campaign trail Saturday in Pennsylvania, where Clinton was clinging to an average 1.8-percentage-point lead, according to RealClearPolitics.  

Trump was to host a rally at a sports complex in Manheim. He said he hoped his visit to Pennsylvania, his sixth in the last two months, would make the race closer there.

With 20 electoral votes, Pennsylvania could be crucial to the outcome of the presidential race.

If Clinton holds on to her leads and wins in Michigan, New Hampshire and Wisconsin, she could capture the 270 electoral votes needed with Colorado and Pennsylvania. If Clinton loses one of those states, she would have to earn victories in Florida, North Carolina and Ohio, where the two major party candidates are tied.

Electoral College

U.S. presidential elections are not decided by a national popular vote. Instead, they are decided by individual races in the 50 states, with each state’s importance in the overall outcome weighted by its population. Winning presidential candidates have to amass a majority of 270 votes in the 538-member Electoral College based on the state-by-state results.

Clinton, meanwhile, is hoping to win over some supporters of former presidential hopeful and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders when he hits the campaign trail soon on behalf of his former opponent. Sanders told MSNBC recently that he was planning a “very, very vigorous” travel schedule that would take him “all over this country” in the weeks leading up to the November election.

Sanders will begin his road show with campaign stops in the battleground states of Iowa and Minnesota on Monday and Tuesday.

Clinton has struggled to win the support of Sanders’ followers, many of them enthusiastic young voters who were enthralled by his campaign promise of a “political revolution” and his emphasis on campaign finance reform.
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