Hurricane Matthew is forcing Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump to tentatively rewrite their campaign playbooks a little over a month ahead of the election.
As Matthew bears down on the Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina, politics has taken a back seat to safety at a crucial point in the campaign. Clinton’s camp has already been hit for making an ad buy on the Weather Channel and other Florida stations in the run-up to the storm, leaving them to scramble and delay those ads.
Meanwhile, the Trump campaign is taking no chances. They have suspended all operations in the areas affected by the hurricane, instead trying to keep focus on the storm and what local officials are communicating. As for ad buys that were already running in the state, they will continue, but they have taken down all negative advertising for the foreseeable future.
The Republican National Committee also announced Thursday that as of Wednesday, they have suspended all voter contact in the region, a less than ideal situation with Election Day so close.
“Anytime you’re working on a presidential campaign, every day you feel like you’re walking on the edge of a cliff. When it quickly turns into a situation where you’re walking a tightrope and a razor wire, you can say the wrong thing and send the wrong message,” said Kevin Madden, a spokesman for Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign when Hurricane Sandy caused damage throughout New Jersey, New York and throughout New England states just over a week before the election.
“You can look in some way like you’re politicizing the situation and you’re trying to be helpful, and you become very hyper-aware of both your actions and your words as a campaign,” Madden said. “You try to make that clear to everyone up and down or throughout the the organization to be aware of that and sensitive to it.”
In 2012, President Obama was the incumbent, leaving Romney to do what he could and, according to Madden, “cede the spotlight” to the president. The Romney campaign was forced to delay ads in the affected region and was unable to campaign as usual in the aftermath.
This year, neither candidate is the incumbent but risks remain for both campaigns.
The Clinton campaign was torched after following the news of their planned five-day $63,000 ad buy on the Weather Channel, which was supposed to start Thursday, particularly from Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, who attacked the former secretary for attempting to exploit the hurricane for “political gain.”
In a tweet Wednesday, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush warned both candidates to “be sensitive” in response to the storm.
Trump released a statement Thursday about the storm, promoting public safety and urging people to respond to local officials’ instructions, ending by telling everyone to “please stay safe.”
Some Democrats, however, believe that the situation with the hurricane could give the Clinton campaign a good reason to make climate change an issue in the final weeks of the campaign, including in Sunday’s second presidential debate. News emerged following the vice presidential debate on Monday that former Vice President Al Gore will stump for Clinton on the campaign trail in an effor to court millennials.
“Where this can have some impact is not just in the event of this disaster itself, but in elevating certain issues,” said Lis Smith, who served as Obama’s director of rapid response in 2012. “You’ve seen the Clinton campaign try recently to reach out to millennial voters and try to make this a bigger issue and have Al Gore out there … This is an unanticipated event that really allows them to discuss the urgency in addressing climate change.”
While Smith doesn’t believe that the storm played much of a factor in 2012 overall, she pointed to then-New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s endorsement of Obama in the aftermath due to that exact issue.
Another issue looking forward for the campaigns, though, is their ground operations in the affected areas, which could hamper their effort to register voters and, ultimately, get out the vote in the coming weeks. In particular, Florida’s voter registration period ends on Tuesday, leaving this upcoming weekend as the last for the campaigns to make registration efforts.
“Right now, you’re going to end up with a lot of people who won’t be out for at least one day of the last big weekends and big pushes, and this is one of the last big pushes,” said Rick Wilson, a Tallahassee-based GOP consultant. “If you’re going out to do voter contacts, this weekend would have been one that you really, really wanted to have as many of your people out in the field as possible.”
Wilson also noted that the storm could have more of an effect on Trump given that Jacksonville, which could bear the brunt of the damage, is a Republican-leaning area.
According to the latest RealClearPolitics average in Florida, Clinton leads Trump by 2.4 points.
