Hillary Clinton’s campaign has traded in its precision airstrikes on the GOP nominee’s campaign for artillery barrages on the entire Republican Party.
The former secretary of state and her surrogates are still concentrating fire on Donald Trump and his running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, but they’ve also broadened their campaign strategy to include attacks on vulnerable Republican lawmakers.
The Clinton camp’s newest tactic is simple: Find Republican senators who are running in competitive races, and then hammer away at them for their ties to the Trump and try to sink them by fastening the GOP nominee around their necks.
Democratic vice presidential candidate Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., for example, went after Marco Rubio this week for saying he’d vote for Trump even after everything the Florida senator said during the GOP primary.
“[Rubio] called Donald Trump ‘dangerous,’ and he called Donald Trump a ‘con artist,’ but he’s supporting Donald Trump. I mean, ‘Con Artists for Trump,'” Kaine said at a campaign stop in Miami, Fla. “I don’t get it.”
“When someone is unwilling to condemn the many things that ought to be condemned about Donald Trump’s divisive campaign, then you got to ask yourself whether they’re the right person to represent you and to represent your values,” the Virginia senator added.
Kaine isn’t the only member of Clinton’s surrogate squad to go after Rubio for voicing support for Trump: President Obama also mocked the Florida Republican last week at a campaign event in Miami.
“I’m even more confused by Republican politicians who still support Donald Trump,” Obama said. “Marco Rubio is one of those people. How does that work? How can you call him a ‘con artist’ and ‘dangerous’ and object to all the controversial things he says and then say, ‘But I’m still going vote for him?’ C’mon, man!”
The president continued, and laid into Rubio for dancing a fine line between supporting and denouncing Trump.
“You know what that is, though? It is the height of cynicism,” Obama said. “That’s the sign of someone who will say anything, do anything, pretend to be anybody just to get elected. And you know what? If you’re willing to be anybody just to be somebody, then you don’t have the leadership that Florida needs in the United States Senate.”
Rubio leads in Florida against his Democratic opponent, Rep. Patrick Murphy, by 3.4 points, according to a RealClearPolitics polling average.
Moments after Kaine ripped into Rubio Monday morning, Clinton and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., went to work on Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., who is fighting a tough re-election battle against Democratic Gov. Maggie Hassan.
“For more than a year, Donald Trump has made headlines almost every day and where has Senator Kelly Ayotte been?” Warren asked Monday at a campaign event in Manchester, N.H.
“Donald Trump called Latinos rapists and murderers. Kelly stuck with him. Trump called African-Americans thugs and Kelly stuck with him. Trump attacked a Gold Star family and Kelly stuck with him. Trump compared himself to dictators and praised Vladimir Putin and Kelly stuck with him. Trump even attacked Kelly Ayotte and called her weak and Kelly stuck with him,” the senator said, adding, “Donald Trump is right: Kelly is weak.”
Clinton chimed in later, and said in reference to Gov. Hassan, “Unlike her opponent, she has never been afraid to stand up to Donald Trump. She knows he shouldn’t be a role model for our kids or anybody else, for that matter.”
Hassan is ahead of Ayotte by two points, according to RealClearPolitics.
Clinton also went after embattled Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., and criticized the GOP lawmaker this weekend for dodging questions about whether he supports Trump,
“He still refuses to stand up to Donald Trump,” Clinton said Saturday at a campaign stop in Pennsylvania. “Now a lot of Republicans have. They have had the grit and the guts to stand up and say he does not represent me.”
“But Pat Toomey heard Donald attack a grieving Gold Star family who lost their son in the Iraq war. He heard Donald call Mexican immigrants rapists. He heard him say terrible things about women. He heard him spread the lie that our first black president wasn’t really born in America,” she said. “Now how much more does Pat Toomey need to hear? If he doesn’t have the courage to stand up to Donald Trump after all this, then can you be sure he’ll stand up for you when it counts?”
Toomey has a slight edge on his Democratic opponent, Katie McGinty, and leads her in the polls by 1.8 points, according to RealClearPolitics.
Clinton told supporters Monday, “I hope you will do everything you can to elect Katie McGinty your next senator.”
As these three Republican senators move forward with their tough reelection bids, they’re doing it with little or no support from Trump and his team of surrogates.
Not a single one of Trump’s warmup speakers in Tampa have mentioned Marco Rubio, a Republican who also has an election in two weeks.
— Reid J. Epstein (@reidepstein) October 24, 2016
In some cases, Trump’s mouthpieces are actively rooting for Republican defeat.
“Trump is running against a broken establishment. A broken House and a broken Senate that, yes, involves very moderate [Republican In Name Only] Republicans that are the one reason why they’re losing,” Trump super supporter and surrogate Scottie Nell Hughes said this weekend in reference to Toomey’s reelection campaign.
She added, “I love this idea of team player, that Donald Trump has to be on a team, but therefore the the team doesn’t have to support Donald Trump like they have not from the very beginning.”
Rubio says he’ll vote for Trump, but stresses he has misgivings about the GOP nominee. Unlike the Florida senator, Toomey has steadfastly refused to say whether he would vote for Trump, but he hasn’t disavowed Trump either. Ayotte, for her part, has backed and condemned Trump.
On Sunday, Trump’s super surrogate turned fire on both Toomey and Ayotte.
“If those senators had stepped up to the plate knowing that we have record voter turnout we’re seeing right now, we saw it in the primaries, overwhelmingly set records for Donald Trump, maybe they should have said, ‘Maybe we should align ourselves more,'” Hughes said in a CNN interview.
Hughes added, “Once again, this is not about Donald Trump, this is about their less-than-stellar records that, in many cases, Democrats rank as better conservatives than the Republicans themselves like what we’re seeing in New Hampshire.”
