With this year’s election ending in just five days, last-ditch efforts to attack and discredit both presidential candidates have saturated the media. The candidates themselves have quickly capitalized on these issues, giving airtime in their speeches to even the slightest of their opponent’s mistakes. This list aims to present long-standing major issues in both campaigns that have yet to be resolved.
Hillary Clinton
Last October, over 50,000 pages of emails hacked from the account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair were posted on WikiLeaks. Major media outlets like CNN were to report on the leak’s contents, and a writer at the New York Times argued that such a massive release of information does not give journalists an obligation to read through it. More conservative-leaning organizations, like Fox News, have given consistent front-page coverage to the issue on their websites, showing a clear political divide in media attention.
The FBI threw Clinton a curveball on Oct. 28, when a new batch of emails surfaced in possible connection to her past use of a private server. During the Bureau’s investigation of disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner, they discovered that Huma Abedin, a close aide to Clinton and Weiner’s wife, had used his laptop to send emails to Clinton. These emails are now under FBI scrutiny to determine whether they contained classified information, but both the content of these emails and how many of them are being examined have yet to be released.
According to Pollster, an aggregate of over 360 polls from 43 sources, Clinton leads in the polls at 47.8 percent of the vote to Trump’s 41.9 percent. Other candidates, including Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, total at 4.6 percent of the vote, while undecided voters are 5.7 percent of those surveyed.
Donald Trump
Though the 2005 Access Hollywood recording of Donald Trump was leaked almost four weeks ago, the candidate is still under fire from women accusing him of sexual assault in the past. Trump’s most recent accusers are Ninni Laaksonen, a former Miss Finland who claimed on Oct. 28 that the candidate groped her backstage on “The Late Show” with David Letterman; and Jessica Drake, an adult film actress who on Oct. 21 said that Trump kissed her without consent and offered her money for sex at a golf tournament. Counting Laaksonen and Drake, 12 women have accused Trump of sexual assault since the recording was leaked.
Trump has condemned his accusers as liars or agents of Clinton’s campaign, and threatened to sue all of them in retaliation; in addition, he threatened to sue the New York Times after it reported on his first two accusers. Trump has not yet sued or shared any new developments in either case, which continues his trend of threatening litigation without intending to follow through – for reference, a FiveThirtyEight article claims that Trump has threatened to sue a total of 20 times during his campaign, but only went to court twice.