As I recall, August was a pretty bad month for Trump. He was getting a lot of high single digit national polling deficits then. If Clinton had won nationally by 7 or 8 points, don't you think Virginia would have landed close to or past +10 points for her?
Of course, not to say it doesn't have a D lean, but I fully expect the never-ending scandals that Trump was hit with to actually have caused his support to drop as low as the averages showed, and if the election were held during one of those rough spots, like the AH tape or the Kahn drama, that Trump would have lost by a substantial margin as the polls showed.
Indeed. I remember 538 had Clinton winning South Carolina in its now-cast for a time.