LAS VEGAS — There’s a giddiness that sets in for campaigns that sense victory, and a stubborn defiance that lurks for campaigns headed south.
That was the difference between Hillary Clinton, leading in the polls with another solid debate performance under her belt; and Donald Trump, who delivered his best performance to date, but fell short of altering the trajectory of the race.
The contrast in moods of the two campaigns was evident before the debate even began Wednesday evening, on the campus of the University of Nevada Las Vegas. And it couldn’t have been more stark.
The Clinton campaign’s top communications strategists filed en masse into the “spin room,” just outside the debate hall, and posed for a team picture. They looked like they were enjoying themselves.
It’s easy to do when you hold a national lead that, on average, exceeds 6 percentage points.
Trump campaign surrogates and communications officials trickled in intermittently, friendly and available but obviously frustrated with question after question about how they expect to make up ground with less than three weeks to go until Election Day.
“I think a lot of our support is being under-represented in some of these polls,” Jason Miller, a top spokesman for the Trump campaign, told reporters prior to the debate. “Polling’s been all over the map.”
With some exceptions, campaigns that dispute the reliability and accuracy of polling are campaigns that know they’re losing but need to give their supporters a reason not to lose hope.
As Miller was getting cornered by political reporters pushing him to concede the likelihood of defeat, the Clinton spokesmen were busy fielding questions about the prospects of the Democratic nominee flipping perennial red states like Arizona, Georgia and even Texas.
Fresh polls show Clinton with a real shot at flipping Arizona. Trump also looks unusually week in a host of other reliably red states, including Utah and Idaho, leading to chatter among political insiders about the possibility of a landslide victory.
That sort of messaging is the last thing the Clinton team can afford. Early and absentee voting are accelerating and an engaged voting base that believes its vote counts is more likely to show up than one that believes the race is already over.
And so through suppressed smiles, Clinton officials did their best to tamp down talk of a runaway election.
“We feel that if the election were held today we’d feel very good. But there are two and a half weeks left to go and things could still change because there’s been fluidity to the contest up till now,” Clinton campaign press secretary Brian Fallon said, in an interview with the Washington Examiner.
“We were ahead by most public polling — we were ahead by a similar margin in early August and the latter part of August he made up ground and the race tightened again going into the first debate, so we’re not taking anything for granted. But we have in the last two weeks, since the first debate, seen a surge of momentum across the board in all seven of the battleground states where we’re on television.”
Fallon didn’t reveal any of the Clinton campaign’s private data analytics information.
But he suggested that in addition to holding small but clear leads in states like Florida, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, the Clinton camp also believes its doing better than many people believe in Trump-leaning states like Iowa and Ohio.
“Now we feel likes it’s at least an even race in all seven of those states,” Fallon said, referring to Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina and Nevada.
