Hillary Clinton has established a slim edge over Donald J. Trump in early-voter turnout in several vital swing states, pressing her longstanding advantages in state-level organization and potentially mitigating the fallout from her campaign’s latest scrap with the F.B.I. 
 
 Even as Democrats continued to reel from revived questions about Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state — a jolt delivered 11 days before the election in an abstruse letter from the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey — turnout tallies and interviews with dozens of early voters suggest that even a vintage “October surprise” may pack less of a punch than it once did. 
 
 In a race between two deeply polarizing candidates, opinions appear to have been cemented weeks if not months ago for most voters. And the contest is well underway in some of the most important battlegrounds. 
 
 At least 21 million people have voted so far across the country. In the states that are most likely to decide the election — among them Florida, Colorado and Nevada — close to a quarter of the electorate has already cast ballots. While their votes will not be counted until Election Day, registered Democrats are outperforming Republicans in key demographics and urban areas there and in North Carolina, where extensive in-person voting began late last week and which has emerged as one of the most closely contested battlegrounds for the White House and control of the Senate. ||||| At a rally in Grand Rapids, Mich., on Monday Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump thanked Hillary Clinton's top aide Huma Abedin and her husband Anthony Weiner while talking about the FBI investigation in Clinton's private email server. (The Washington Post) 
 
 At a rally in Grand Rapids, Mich., on Monday Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump thanked Hillary Clinton's top aide Huma Abedin and her husband Anthony Weiner while talking about the FBI investigation in Clinton's private email server. (The Washington Post) 
 
 — Top aides for Hillary Clinton on Monday accused FBI Director James Comey of a “double standard” in his handling of the investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state. 
 
 Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook called on Comey to explain why he rushed to disclose new information about the status of the investigation into Clinton, while reportedly opposing, on the grounds that it would be too close to the election, a public statement by the FBI that the Russian government was seeking the influence the presidential race. 
 
 “It is impossible to view this as anything less than a blatant double standard,” Mook said. 
 
 Democrats are reeling from the news late last week that — a little more than a week before the election -- Comey is revisiting his probe into the potential mishandling of classified material. 
 
 Aiming to quickly redirect the focus of the presidential race, the Clinton campaign seized on news reports that Comey had rejected efforts within the FBI to identify Russia as the source of hacking incidents this year, which primarily effected Democratic organizations, including Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. 
 
 1 of 57 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail View Photos The Democratic presidential nominee hits the road as Election Day nears. Caption Hillary Clinton loses to Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Nov. 9, 2016 Hillary Clinton speaks in New York while her husband, former president Bill Clinton, applauds. Melina Mara/The Washington Post Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue. 
 
 Clinton’s press secretary, Brian Fallon, said that Comey “set a standard for narrating a play-by-play for matters involving Hilary Clinton,” but has not set the same standard for inquiries into Russian hacking and potential ties to Republican nominee Donald Trump’s campaign. 
 
 “Director Comey owes the public an explanation for this inconsistency,” Fallon said. 
 
 [Justice Department says it is moving quickly in the renewed investigation into Clinton email server] 
 
 Meanwhile, in Warren, Mich., Trump hammered on the issue of Clinton’s emails during an afternoon rally that started more than two hours late in the Detroit suburb. 
 
 He said that he expects the FBI to find some of the 33,000 emails that have yet to be uncovered among the 650,000 emails that are reportedly on the laptop at the center of the latest controversy. He repeated his claim that Clinton’s use of a private email server “the biggest scandal since Watergate,” and told Clinton to stop blaming the scandal on others. 
 
 ““Hillary Clinton wants to blame everyone else for her mounting legal troubles,” Trump said. “But she has brought this situation onto herself. She’s got nobody to blame but herself.” 
 
 While campaigning in Ohio earlier in the day, Clinton moved to turn the conversation to national security and Trump’s fitness for office. 
 
 The Democratic presidential nominee addressed the email issue at the start of a speech at Kent State University. 
 
 “I’m sure a lot of you may be asking what this new email story is about, and why in the world the FBI would decide to jump into an election with no evidence of wrongdoing,” less than two weeks before Election Day, Clinton said. “That’s a good question.” 
 
 “I understand. And as I’ve said, I’m not making any excuses” for setting up her private email system as she did, Clinton said. “I’ve said it was a mistake, and I regret it.” 
 
 [FBI Director James Comey’s Republican critics are growing by the hour] 
 
 On Monday afternoon, the Justice Department responded to growing calls from a bipartisan group of lawmakers in Congress for additional information about the renewed inquiry. In a letter to lawmakers, the Justice Department said it was moving “as expeditiously as possible” to investigate the new emails, but it did not provide any additional information. 
 
 Clinton’s campaign pushed back hard all weekend against Comey’s decision. Clinton denies that her email put the country at risk, and her campaign says she testified truthfully. 
 
 Other Democrats also demanded swift answers about what Comey is looking for and why he chose to renew the inquiry less than two weeks before Election Day. Democratic senators asked for answers by the end of the day Monday. 
 
 At her rally in Ohio, Clinton predicted that the new inquiry will reach the same conclusion as Comey did at the end of the FBI investigation in July, when he announced that despite what he called sloppiness, there was no evidence of criminal conduct. 
 
 “There is no case,” Clinton said, adding that she thinks most Americans have long since decided how they feel about the email issue. “Now, what people are focused on is choosing the next president and commander in chief of the United States of America.” 
 
 [Is America addicted to this election?] 
 
 Campaigning earlier Monday in Grand Rapids, Mich., Trump said that Comey had “brought back his reputation” with his notice to Congress on Friday that he would look at new information in the case. 
 
 “It took a lot of guts” for Comey to change course three months after ending the probe into whether classified information was compromised, Trump said. “I really disagreed with him” over that earlier decision. “I was not his fan. But what he did brought back his reputation.” 
 
 During her lengthy speech at Kent State, Clinton returned to an argument that has been among her most potent: that Trump’s “very thin skin” and brash, ill-informed commentary on world affairs disqualifies him as commander in chief. 
 
 “I’m running against a man who says he doesn’t understand why we can’t use nuclear weapons. He wants more countries to have nuclear weapons.” Clinton said. “And if you’re telling yourself he’s going to surround himself with smart people to stop these crazy ideas, remember this: He was asked who he consults on foreign policy. Donald Trump said he doesn’t need to consult because, and I quote, ‘I have a very good brain.’” 
 
 Turning to Trump’s relationship with Vladi­mir Putin, Clinton said the Russian president is playing Trump for a patsy. 
 
 “He knows he can use flattery to get into Donald’s head, to make Donald the Kremlin’s puppet,” she said of Putin, “and it seems to be working. Donald has signaled to Putin that he will let Russia do whatever it wants.” 
 
 [Clinton loses popularity edge in tight race with Trump, new Post-ABC Tracking Poll finds] 
 
 She also ran through a series of Trump remarks about the NATO alliance, U.S. nuclear umbrella in Asia and other topics that she said show him to be ignorant or reckless. 
 
 “This is one of those make-or-break moments for our nation,” she said. 
 
 Aside from changing the subject from the emails, Clinton’s efforts in Ohio are part of a strategy to create several paths to an electoral college victory — the simplest of which would be to win Florida. Clinton spent the weekend campaigning in the Sunshine State, where some polls show Trump leading. 
 
 But the campaign has encountered significant obstacles over the weekend after Comey reignited a political firestorm when he said FBI officials had detected a batch of emails pertinent to the earlier case during an “unrelated” investigation. 
 
 People close to the situation have told The Washington Post that the emails were found on a computer belonging to disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner, who is under investigation for allegedly exchanging lewd messages with a 15-year-old girl. Weiner is the estranged husband of Clinton campaign vice chairman Huma Abedin. 
 
 Abedin, who is very often the aide closest to Clinton’s side on trips, has been absent from the campaign plane since the Comey news broke. 
 
 [Donald Trump is refusing to pay his campaign pollster three-quarters of a million dollars] 
 
 In Michigan when Trump first brought up Clinton’s emails, the crowd began to loudly chant: “Lock her up! Lock her up!” In the audience was a woman dressed up in an orange prison jumpsuit labeled “Clinton.” 
 
 As his audience laughed, Trump crowed, “Thank you, Huma,” mispronouncing Abedin’s first name as “OO-ma.” “Thank you, Huma! And thank you, Anthony Weiner.” 
 
 Clinton opened the last full week of campaigning Monday with a television advertisement revisiting the famous 1964 “Daisy” ad about the looming danger of nuclear weapons. The new ad features the same woman who, as a small girl, plucked petals from a flower in the original ad for President Lyndon Johnson’s campaign, which was aimed at Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater. 
 
 Clinton’s goal at rallies Monday near Cleveland and in Cincinnati is to keep up enthusiasm among Democrats and encourage more early voting this week. Former president Bill Clinton campaigned for his wife in Cleveland over the weekend, and President Obama is due in Columbus on Tuesday. 
 
 Trump leads Clinton in Ohio by 1.3 percentage points in the RealClearPolitics average of recent polls. That is within the margin of error, meaning the race is effectively tied. 
 
 On Sunday night, the FBI obtained a warrant to review the emails, which one official said include a significant number of messages associated with Clinton and Abedin. In his letter to Congress, Comey said that whether the emails provide any new information to the Clinton investigation had yet to be determined, but Democrats worry that the news could sway the election. 
 
 Johnson reported from Grand Rapids, Mich. Anne Gearan contributed from Washington. ||||| Senate Democratic leader said FBI Director James Comey may have violated a federal law when he disclosed, less than two weeks before the presidential election, that his office was pursuing potential new evidence related to Democratic nominee ’s use of a private email server as secretary of state. Mr. Reid was preparing to send a […] ||||| The first national polls taken in the immediate aftermath of the election’s latest October surprise suggest it’s having a limited impact on the presidential race so far. But there are a few swing states where the bombshell letter FBI Director James Comey sent to Congress on Friday could still have a disproportionate effect. 
 
 Already, the persistent and overriding unpopularity of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump had created more volatility than usual for the final week of a presidential campaign — as evidenced by the larger percentages of undecided voters and those backing third-party candidates. 
 
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 And with Clinton’s email scandal vaulted back into the news by Comey’s ambiguous letter to Congress last week, that instability creates more uncertainty than usual going into the last full week of campaigning across the potentially decisive states in the Electoral College — uncertainty that isn’t uniform across the map. 
 
 In the most-contested battleground states, voters have been bombarded with seemingly nonstop television advertisements and ground-game mobilization efforts. In general, polls in these states show fewer undecided voters — though the percentage of voters backing third-party candidates is more variable. 
 
 Polls in some battleground states, like Colorado and New Hampshire, show large percentages of voters who aren’t committing to Clinton or Trump. But in states like North Carolina and Florida, while the percentage of undecided voters remains historically high in some polls, there are fewer third-party voters, creating less opportunity for Trump or Clinton in the closing days. 
 
 EIther way, at this stage in the campaign those are significant pools of voters who have not committed to either major-party nominee. A late-breaking bombshell like Comey’s letter threatens not just to prod voters still on the fence — it could also energize Republicans and depress Democrats at just the right moment to boost Trump and dog Clinton. 
 
 There are limits, however, to how widespread that effect might be because of early voting in some battleground states — which not only makes it easier for lower-propensity voters to participate, but also has allowed Clinton’s campaign, which is better organized in most swing states, to bank votes over the past few weeks. That’s especially true in Florida, where 3.6 million people had voted as of the latest data available Sunday; North Carolina, where 1.1 million residents had voted as of Friday morning; and Nevada, where more than 430,000 ballots had been cast as of Sunday night. 
 
 Colorado’s nine electoral votes have appeared out of reach for Trump for most of the campaign, but Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein have generally run stronger there than in other states. The most recent live-telephone survey in the state is two weeks old, but the Quinnipiac University poll in mid-October showed Johnson at 10 percent and Stein at 3 percent. Additionally, a combined 6 percent of likely voters in that survey said they were undecided or preferred another candidate — slightly more than simultaneous surveys in other battleground states. 
 
 Trump is advertising in Colorado, but Clinton’s campaign and a super PAC supporting her have been off the air in the state, which Democrats thought was safely in Clinton’s column. Moreover, the state’s all-mail voting could help alleviate any decrease in Democratic enthusiasm over the email issue. 
 
 Like Colorado, Virginia is another state Trump is still contesting in which Democrats have felt comfortable enough to pull their television ads. There is still a large percentage of voters potentially up for grabs there, however: While two polls last week gave Clinton large leads, undecideds and third-party supporters combined for 12 percent of the electorate in a Quinnipiac University poll and 15 percent in a Christopher Newport University poll . Johnson, Stein and Evan McMullin — the former House GOP staffer running as an independent in fewer than a dozen states — are all on the ballot there. 
 
 Johnson and Stein are also running strong in New Hampshire, where Clinton has led consistently in the polls, according to two live-caller polls conducted last week. Both polls, from Monmouth University and NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist , showed 5 percent of likely voters undecided or preferring another candidate. But the NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll shows Johnson at 10 percent and Stein at 4 percent — which are both larger percentages than any third-party candidate has received in the state since 1996. The Monmouth University poll showed smaller vote shares for Johnson (7 percent) and Stein (1 percent). 
 
 To the extent the uncommitted voters are Republican leaners who have been hesitant about Trump, the resurrection of the FBI investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server could help them come home to the GOP nominee. 
 
 But University of New Hampshire professor Dante Scala pointed out that in a University of New Hampshire poll earlier this month, just as many purely undecided voters identified as moderates and independents. 
 
 “I would not think this news is enough to push them [to one candidate] for good,” Scala said in an email Sunday, adding that the future of these moderate voters “depends on next week.” (New Hampshire doesn't allow early voting.) 
 
 In other hotly contested battleground states, late developments appear less likely to move the needle — in part because fewer voters are on the fence, but also because more votes have already been cast. 
 
 The 3.6 million votes that had been cast in Florida as of Friday morning represents more than 40 percent of the state’s 2012 total vote. And fewer voters are supporting third-party candidates in the largest battleground state: A Siena College poll conducted last week for the New York Times’ “Upshot,” in which Trump led Clinton by 4 points, showed Johnson at 4 percent and Stein at 2 percent, with 6 percent undecided or backing another candidate. Clinton and Trump were deadlocked in an NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll, also released Sunday, with 7 percent saying the supported neither or another candidate, and only 1 percent undecided. 
 
 In North Carolina, the 1.1 million votes already cast is about a quarter of the total 2012 vote. Clinton had a 6-point lead in an NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll out on Sunday, with 5 percent supporting neither or another candidate and 2 percent undecided. 
 
 And in difficult-to-poll Nevada, the early vote accounted for more than 40 percent of the total 2012 vote. Still, the state has a history of backing third-party candidates, and disgusted voters can also choose the “none of these candidates” option on the ballot. 
 
 The electorate is also more hard-wired in other states with limited early-voting opportunities, like Pennsylvania, which is a must-win state for Trump, especially if he loses North Carolina. Still, there are some opportunities for Trump to gain: There is no early voting in Pennsylvania, so the bulk of the votes will be cast after the Comey letter. And another Siena poll conducted for "Upshot" last week showed Clinton leading by 7 points, but only at 46 percent. Johnson was at 6 percent and Stein at 3 percent, and 6 percent were undecided or preferred another candidate. 
 
 If the email issue does create opportunities for Trump, those might come in states where the campaigns have been less active thus far. The Republican nominee, perhaps uncoincidentally, was in New Mexico on Sunday night and is traveling to Michigan on Monday and Wisconsin on Tuesday. 
 
 Polling has been sparse in New Mexico, but polls of Michigan and Wisconsin have suggested there are more uncommitted voters there than in other states. An EPIC-MRA poll in Michigan, which Republicans last won in 1988, showed the undecided share at an unusually high 15 percent. Michigan, like New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, doesn't allow in-person early voting. 
 
 There are fewer undecided voters in Wisconsin, which hasn’t gone for the GOP presidential nominee since 1984: A Monmouth University poll two weeks ago showed Johnson at 6 percent and Stein at 1 percent, and a combined 7 percent undecided or preferring another candidate. 
 
 Authors:
– President Barack Obama declined to join in his party's criticism of FBI Director James Comey on Monday, The Hill reports. Director Comey has faced a barrage of attacks from Democrats, some of whom accuse him of trying to meddle in the election by announcing a probe into newly uncovered Hillary Clinton emails just days before the presidential election. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid even went as far as accusing Comey of violating a federal law that prohibits government officials from using their position to impact an election, the Wall Street Journal reports. But Obama doesn't believe anything nefarious is going on, per White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest, who told reporters Comey is "a man of integrity [and] good character," and that "the president doesn’t believe he’s secretly strategizing to benefit one candidate or one political party." Meanwhile, Politico looks at whether the latest email revelations could push swing states toward Trump. One expert notes, "I would not think this news is enough to push them [to one candidate] for good." And in more potentially good news for the Clinton campaign, the New York Times reports some 21 million people have already submitted their votes via mail-in ballots or early voting, meaning their votes won't be affected by any late-breaking scandals. Over at the Trump campaign, the Washington Post reports that Trump praised Comey's move Monday, saying Comey had "brought back his reputation" by being transparent about the new information.