(Photo by Gage Skidmore - CC BY 2.0)

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

A pair of new polls suggest that Arizona in back in play for the presidential race. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump appear to be in a dead heat with a little more than a month to go before the election.

First it’s important to note that the Emerson College sampling of 600 Arizonans found that Republican incumbent Sen. John McCain has a comfortable 16-point lead over Democrat Ann Kirkpatrick. But when it comes to top of the ticket, those same registered voters — composed of mostly of those who identify as independents — favor Hillary Clinton 44-42 percent over Donald Trump. 

The Emerson numbers, gathered over the past week, are within the statistical margin of error, but buck a trend that had seen Trump with a narrow lead in polls before the first debate.

Meanwhile, a survey by the Phoenix-based polling firm Owens Harkey Predictive Insights, conducted in the days after the debate, shows Clinton and Trump in a statistical dead heat with 42 percent each in Arizona. Nine percent of the 700 plus likely voters in this poll are undecided.