Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump participates in the third and final presidential debate at the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) in Las Vegas, Nevada, the United States, Oct. 19, 2016.(Photo: Xinhua/Yin Bogu)
U.S. Presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are running neck-in-neck just a day before the Election Day, but experts said the controversial Trump may have done too little, too late to clinch the White House.
While elections can be full of surprises - and this one is tight - most analysts give a slight edge to Clinton, the Democratic nominee, just a day before Americans head to the polls on Tuesday.
The latest CNN Poll of Polls gives Clinton a four-point lead over Trump, 46 percent to 42 percent.
Trump has been full of surprises since he began his campaign a year ago. At times it seemed his campaign was finished, but he was then able to come back out swinging. After trailing behind by around seven points just a few weeks ago, Trump's numbers saw a surge in recent days in the Real Clear Politics poll average.
Recent days have also coincided with a spate of new ads from Trump, which argue that he is an agent of change who can replace what he bills as a corrupt class of political elitists in Washington.
At the same time, Trump' s wife Melania, an immigrant from Slovenia, has hit the campaign trail to make the argument that Trump is only against illegal immigration but supports legal immigrants, as Trump has made many comments perceived by the public to be anti-immigrant.
But analysts said Trump should have done all this months ago, instead of at the 11th hour, when many voters have already made up their minds or even cast their votes in early voting.
"Much of this is too late," Dan Mahaffee, an analyst with the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress, told Xinhua, referring to Trump' s last-minute scramble to win votes.
Christopher Galdieri, assistant professor at Saint Anselm College, told Xinhua that the Trump campaign "has been, and continues to be, lacking in all of the things a major presidential candidate needs to do."
"Rallies are important, but so are... turnout operations, and the like. And as far as anyone can tell, Trump doesn't have much of any of those things. If there are states that go into Tuesday with both candidates roughly tied, Clinton's turnout organization could ...make the difference," he said.
Indeed, Trump has focused much of his energy on rallies, but has been weak in the ground game, and has not sent his people out to do much of the door-to-door campaigning that is often crucial to winning presidential elections.
Moreover, while Trump' s bombast won him the primaries against Republic competitors, the brash billionaire should have pivoted toward acting more presidential, analysts said. Trump, known for outlandish comments against women and some minorities, should have toned down this rhetoric and focused on jobs and the economy - the main issues for most Americans in the 2016 elections, pundits and analysts said.
The New York mogul's over-the-top comments against Latinos have hurt him badly with this crucial minority. With the exception of older Cuban-Americans in the state of Florida, most Hispanics are not expected to vote for Trump.
"Latinos are voting in big numbers and they could be decisive in key states such as Nevada and Florida. Trump has been his own worst enemy. If he had avoided so many offensive statements, he would have been in position to win the campaign. As things stand now, however, these comments may be the ones that doom him," Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Darrell West told Xinhua.
While Trump has been able to create a strong support base of white, blue-collar Republicans who feel the economy has left them behind, the candidate has been unable to reach out beyond that base. And in focusing only on the needs of his base, he has neglected the many other groups he needed to bring into the tent.
"The way that Trump was able to harness the anger among the populist GOP base began a long process of alienating a large portion of the American electorate," Dan Mahaffee, an analyst with the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress, told Xinhua
That resulted in a campaign and candidate that was unable to take advantage of the many shortcomings Clinton faced in winning voters, Mahaffee said.
"If the current trends and probabilities hold, the GOP electorate' s choice of Trump as their standard bearer resulted in an election where the GOP failed to grasp the historical advantage of being an alternate vision after two terms of Democratic administration," he said.
