Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are in a near-dead heat for the presidency, but the race is still Clinton’s to lose.
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That’s the assessment of Matthew Dowd in the latest episode of Examining Politics, the podcast from the Washington Examiner. Dowd is the chief political analyst for ABC News and served as the chief political strategist for the 2004 re-election of President George W. Bush.
Dowd predicted early in the GOP primary campaign that Trump was on his way to winning the Republican nomination. But he said that the New York businessman still has work to do coming out of a losing performance in the first presidential debate.
“Donald Trump has to figure out, with the next debate or the one after that or probably both, how to get this from the red zone to the end zone and he’s been in the red zone a number of times but he hasn’t been in the end zone and taken a lead,” Dowd said.
One way Trump could help himself, Dowd said, would be to accept that he lost the first debate to Clinton, and move on to the next one, scheduled for Oct. 9.
Dowd said Trump only made matters worse by insisting that his worst moments in Monday evening’s debate weren’t problems. In doing so, Trump ensured that those moments would receive even more coverage, and bleed into the news cycles that followed the blanket coverage of the event.
“The first thing you need is some humility and honesty about your actual performance and how it compared with your opponent’s and I think it’s always better,” Dowd said, when asked his opinion of the best way to handle a subpar debate performance — something he experienced during the 2004 campaign when Bush lost the first debate to Democrat John Kerry.
“I thought [Trump] could have easily come out of that debate and said: ‘I was happy with my performance, I can do better, but [Clinton] is a person who has been in the political eye and run for office after office after office, and she’ more trained in the art of sound bites,'” Dowd said. “This is what I would have said.”
